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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

‘A fierce battle in
the tree-tops ”

mere er BROTHER TO THE BEAR
AND OTHER ANIMAL
STUDIES

BN

WILLIAM J. LONG

WOOD FOLK SERIES
BOOK FIVE

GINN & COMPANY

BOSTON - NEW YORK - CHICAGO - LONDON

ann

ov a rt FS rare - vies
PF es - a og ; . .. dé
Le Le

~

o

= e Po ee

LIBRARY of CONGRESS
Two Copies Heceived

DEC 6 i904

Opyrigut Entry
OV-6¢, (Fo:
GLASS C. Noi §

1206
COPY A

ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL

COPYRIGHT, 1903, 1904,

By WILLIAM J. LONG

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

' 44.11

Che Atheneum Press
GINN & COMPANY: CAM-
BRIDGE: MASSACHUSETTS

PROBE A.C BE.

HE object of this little book, so far as it has an
object beyond that of sharing a simple pleasure of
mine with others, will be found in the eleventh chapter,
entitled “The Point of View.” The title will be explained
in the first chapter on “A Little Brother to the Bear.”
All the sketches here are reproduced from my own note-
books largely, or from my own memory, and the observa-
tions cover a period of some thirty years, from the time
when I first began to prowl about the home woods with a
child’s wonder and delight to my last hard winter trip into
the Canadian wilderness. Some of the chapters, like those
of the Woodcock and the Coon, represent the characteris-
tics of scores of animals and birds of the same species ;
others, like those of the Bear and Eider-Duck in “ Animal

)

Surgery,” represent the acute intelligence of certain individ-
ual animals that nature seems to have lifted enormously
above the level of their fellows ; and in a single case — that
of the Toad — I have, for the story’s sake, gathered into one

creature the habits of four or five of these humble little

iii

iv Preface

helpers of ours that I have watched at different times and in
different places. 7

The queer names herein used for beasts and birds are
those given by the Milicete Indians, and represent usually
some sound or suggestion of the creatures themselves.
Except where it is plainly stated otherwise, all the incidents
and observations have passed under my own eyes and have
been confirmed later by other observers. In the records,
while holding closely to the facts, I have simply tried to
make all these animals as interesting to the reader as they
were to me when I discovered them.

WILLIAM J. LONG.
STAMFORD, CONN., March, 1903.

CORE BONES

PAGE
A LITTLE BROTHER TO THE BEAR . é : ; : ; 3
WHITOOWEEK THE HERMIT : i ‘ : - : Meee 2)
A Woopcock GENIUS : : ; : : : Sel ae eae 6 =.
WHEN UPWEEKIS GOES HUNTING : : : : : a Of
ipUNK THE FAT ONE . : Z j : : : Ras
MoOOowWEEN’S DEN : : : : : : : ‘ «16
KINGFISHER’S KINDERGARTEN . : : : : ‘ 2) 208
PEKOMPF’S CUNNING . ; : : : : : : St PEG
ANIMAL SURGERY ; : ‘ : : : : : =) 832
HUNTING WITHOUT A GUN 2 : : : ‘ : — FAG
THE POINT OF VIEW : : ; : ‘ : : {Ego

GLOSSARY OF INDIAN NAMES . : ; = : : ame

Xf I if

mm i hi
uy

iy

3} EW knew the way to the little house in the rocks
where the Little Brother to the Bear lived. It was
miles away from every other house but one, in the
heart of the big still woods. You had to leave the
highway where it dipped into a cool dark hollow
among the pines, and follow a lonely old road that the
wood-choppers sometimes used in winter, and that led
you, if you followed it far enough, to a tumble-down
old mill on another cross-road, where the brook chat-
tered and laughed all day long at the rusty wheel, and
the phoebe built unmolested under the sagging beams,,
and you could sometimes hear a trout jumping among
the foam bubbles in the twilight. But you did not go
so far if you wanted to find where the Little Brother
to the Bear lived.

4 A Little Brother to the Bear

As you followed the wood road you came suddenly
to a little clearing, with a brook and a wild meadow
and a ledge all covered with ferns. The road twisted
about here, as a road always does in going by a pretty
place, as if it were turning back for another look.
There was a little old house under the ledge wherein
some shy, silent children lived; and this was the only
dwelling of man on the three-mile road.

Just beyond, at a point where the underbrush was
thickest, an unnoticed cart path stole away from the
wood road and brought you to a little pond in the
woods, at the spot where, centuries ago, the beavers
had made a dam and a deep place for stowing their
winter’s wood. If you took a long pole and prodded
deep in the mud here, you would sometimes find a
stick of the beaver’s food-wood, its conical ends show-
ing the strong tooth marks plainly, its bark still fresh
and waiting to be eaten when the little owner should
come back again; for that is what he cut it and put it
there for, untold years ago.

Very few ever thought of this, however; those
who came to the spot had all their thoughts for the
bullpouts that swarmed in the beaver's old storehouse
and that would bite well on dark days. There were
ledges all about the ancient dam and on both sides
of the woodsy valley below; and among the mossy,

A Little Brother to the Bear 5

fern-covered rocks of these ledges one of the shy
children, with whom I had made friends, pointed out
an arched doorway made by two great stones leaning
against each other.

“Thome animal livth in there. I theen him. I
peeked, one day, an’ I theen hith eyeth wink; an’, an’,
an’ then I ran away,” he said, his own eyes all round
with the wonder of the woods.

We made no noise, but lay down under a bush to-
gether and watched the wonderful old doorway until
it was time for the shy child to go home; but nothing
came out, nor even showed a shining inquisitive eye
in the doorway behind the screen of hanging ferns.
Still we knew something was in there, for I showed
my little woodsman, to his great wonder and delight, a
short gray hair tipped with black clinging to the rocks.
Then we went away more cautiously than we came.

“ Maybe it’s a coon,” I told the shy child, “for they
are sleepyheads and snooze all day. Foxy, too; they
don’t come out till dark, and they go in again before
daylight, so that boys can’t find out where they live.”

When the time of full moon came I went back to
the little house among the ledges, one afternoon, and
hid under the same bush to watch until something
should come out. But first I looked all about, and found
a huge hollow chestnut tree that the wood-choppers

6 A Little Brother to the Bear

had passed by for years as not worth the cutting.
There were scratches and claw pits everywhere in the
rough bark, and just under the lower limbs was a big
dark knot hole that might be a doorway to a den. So
I lay down in hiding where I could see both the tree
and the fern-screened archway among the rocks by
simply turning my head.

At twilight there were sudden scratchings in the
hollow tree, mounting higher and higher; then muffled
grunts and whinings and expostulations, as if little voices
inside the tree were saying: Wy turn first. No, mine /
k:-e-e-e-ahh, get out! The whinings stopped abruptly
and a face appeared in the dark knot hole—a sharp,
pointed face with alert ears and bright eyes that looked
out keenly over the still woods where only shadows
were creeping about and only a wild duck disturbed the
silence, quacking softly to her brood in the little pond.
Then the whining began again in the hollow tree, and
four other little faces pushed their sharp noses into the
knot hole, filling it completely, all watching and listen-
ing, and wiggling their chins down on their fellows’
heads so as to get a better view point, yet all eager as
children to be out and at play after their long sleep.

One impatient little fellow clawed his way upon his
mother’s back and thrust his face out between her
ears, and then I had a chance to see it better—a

_A Little Brother to the Bear 7

wonderful face, full of whims and drollery, with a white
ring about its pointed muzzle, and a dark line running
from the top of its nose and spreading into ebony rings
around each eye, as if he were wearing queer smoked
goggles, behind which the eyes twinkled and shone,
or grew sober with much gravity as he heard the duck
quacking. A keen face, yet very innocent, in which
dog intelligence and fox cunning and bear drollery
mingled perfectly; a face full of surprises, that set you
smiling and thinking at once; a fascinating, inquisitive
face, the most lovable and contradictious among the
Wood Folk,—the face of Mooweesuk the coon, the
Little Brother to the Bear, as Indian and naturalist
unite in calling him.

The mother came out first and sagged away back-
wards down the tree, swinging her head from side to
side to look down over her shoulder and see how far
yet, in true bear fashion. The four little ones followed
her, clawing and whining their way to the bottom —
all but one, who when half-way down turned and
jumped, landing on his mother’s soft back to save
_ himself trouble. Then she led the way to the door-
way among the rocks, and the young followed in single
file, winding about on her trail, stopping and sniffing
when she did, and imitating her every action, just as
young bear cubs do when roaming about the woods.

8 A Little Brother to the Bear

At the mouth of the den she stepped aside, and the
young filed in out of sight, one after another. The
mother looked and listened for a moment, then scuttled
away through the woods as a clear tremulous whinny
came floating in through the twilight. A moment
later I saw her on the shore of the pond with a larger
coon, her mate probably, who had been asleep in an-
other hollow tree by himself; and the two went off
along the shore frogging and fishing together.

The mother had scarcely disappeared when the
little ones came out of their den and began playing
together, rolling and tumbling about like a litter of fox
cubs, doing it for fun purely, yet exercising every claw
and muscle for the hard work that a coon must do
when he is called upon to take care of himself. After
a time one of the cubs left his brothers playing and
went back to the chestnut tree by the same way that
he had come, following every turn and winding of the
back trail as if there were a path there—as there
probably was, to his eyes and nose, though mine could
not find any. He climbed the tree, as if he were after
something, and disappeared into the knot hole, where
I could hear the little fellow whining and scratching
his way down inside the tree. In a moment he reap-
peared with something in his mouth. In the dusk I
could not make out what it was, but as he came back

“The little ones came out of their den
and began playing together ’’

A Little Brother to the Bear 9

and passed within ten feet of where I was hiding I
had my field-glasses upon him and saw it plainly —
a little knot of wood with a crook in it, the solitary
plaything which you will find, all smooth from much
handling, in almost every house where the Little
Brother to the Bear has lived.

He carried it back to where the young coons were
playing, lay down among them, and began to play by
himself, passing the plaything back and forth through
his wonderful front paws, striking it up, catching it,
and rolling it around his neck and under his body, as a
child does who has but one plaything. Some of the
other coons joined him, and the little crooked knot
went whirling back and forth between them, was
rolled and caught, and hidden and found again, —all
in silent intentness and with a pleasure that, even in
the twilight, was unmistakable.

In the midst of this quiet play there came a faint
ripple and splash of water, and the little coons
dropped their plaything and stood listening, eyes all
bright behind their dark goggles, noses wiggling, and
ears cocked at the plashing on the pond shore. The
mother was there diligently sousing something that
she had caught; and presently she appeared and the
little ones forgot their play in the joy of eating. But
it was too far away and the shadows were now too

10 A Little Brother to the Bear

dark to see what it was that she had brought home,
and how she divided it among them. When she went
away again it had grown dark enough for safety, and
the young followed her in single file to the pond shore,
where I soon lost them among the cool shadows.

That was the beginning of a long acquaintance, cul-
tivated sometimes by day, more often by night; some-
times alone, when I would catch one of the family
fishing or clamming or grubbing roots or nest robbing;
sometimes with a boy, who caught two of the family
in his traps; and again with the hunters under the
September moon, when some foxy old coon would
gather a freebooter band about him and lead them
out to a raid on the cornfields. There each coon
turned himself promptly into an agent of destruction
and, reveling in the unwonted abundance, would pull
down and destroy like a little savage, and taste twenty
milky ears of corn before he found one that suited him
perfectly; and then, too full for play or for roaming
about to find all the hollow trees in the woods, he
would take himself off to the nearest good den and
sleep till he was hungry again and the low whinny of
the old leader called him out for another raid.

Could we have followed the family on this first night
of their wanderings, before the raids began and the
dogs had scattered them, we should have understood

A Little Brother to the Bear II

why Mooweesuk is called a brother to the bear. Run-
ning he steps on his toes, like a dog; and anatomic-
ally, especially in the development of the skull and ear
bones, he suggests the prehistoric ancestor of both dog
and wolf; but otherwise he is a pocket-edition of Moo-
ween in all his habits. The mother always leads, like
a bear, and the little ones follow in single file, noting
everything that the mother calls attention to. They
sit on their haunches and walk flat-footed, like a bear,
leaving a track from their hind feet like that of a dwarf
baby. Everything eatable in the woods ministers to
their hunger, as it does to that of the greedy prowler
in the black coat. Now they stir up an ant’s nest;
now they grub into a rotten log for worms and beetles.
If they can find sweet sap, or a bit of molasses in an
old camp, they dip their paws in it and then lick them
clean, as Mooween does. They hunt now for winter-
green berries, and now for a woodmouse. They find
a shallow place in the brook, when the suckers are
running, and wait there till the big fish g6 by, when
they flip them out with their paws and scramble after
them. From this fishing they turn to lush water-grass,
or to digging frogs arid turtles out of the mud; and
the turtle’s shell is cracked by dropping a stone upon
it. Now they steal into the coop and scuttle away with
a chicken; and after eating it they come back to the

12 A Little Brother to the Bear

garden to crack a pumpkin open and make a dessert
of the seeds. Now they see a muskrat swimming by
in the pond with a mussel in his mouth, and they fol-
low after him along the bank; for Musquash has a
curious habit of eating in regular places —a flat rock,
a stranded log, a certain tussock from which he has
cut away the grass—and will often gather half a dozen
or more clams and mussels before he sits down to dine.
Mooweesuk watches till he finds the place; then, while
Musquash is gone away after more clams, he will run
off with all that he finds on the dining table.

A score of times, on the ponds and streams, I have
read the record of this little comedy. You can always
tell the place where Musquash eats by the pile of mus-
sel shells in the water below it; and sometimes you
will find Mooweesuk’s track stealing down to the
place, and if you follow it you will find where he
cracked the clams that Musquash had gathered.

There is another way in which Mooweesuk is curi-
ously like a bear: he wanders very widely, but he has
regular beats, like Mooween, and, if not disturbed,
always comes back with more or less regularity to any
place where you have once seen him, and comes by
the same unseen path. Like Mooween, his knowledge
of the woods is wide and accurate. He knows—
partly by searching them out, and partly from his

A Little Brother to the Bear 13

mother, who takes him and shows him where they
are —every den and hollow tree that will shelter a
coon in times of trouble. He has always one den
near a cornfield, where he can sleep when too full or
too lazy to travel; he has one dry tree for stormy
weather, and one cool mossy shell in deep shadow for
the hot summer days. He has at least one sunny
nook in the top of a hollow stub, where he loves to lie
and soak in the fall sunshine; and one favorite giant
tree with the deepest and warmest hollow, which he
invariably uses for his long winter sleep. And besides
all these he has at least one tower of refuge near every
path of his, to which he can betake himself when sud-
den danger threatens from dogs or men.

Though he walks and hunts and fights and feeds
like a bear, Mooweesuk has many habits of his own
that Mooween has never approached. One of these
is his habit of nest robbing. Mooween does that, to
be sure, for he is fond of eggs; but he must confine
himself largely to ground-birds and to nests that he
can reach by standing on his hind legs. Therefore
are the woodpeckers all safe from him. Mooweesuk,
on his part, can never see a hole in a tree without
putting his nose into it to find out whether it contains
any eggs or young woodpeckers. If it does contain
them, he will reach a paw down, clinging close to the

14 A Little Brother to the Bear

tree and stretching and pushing his arm into the hole
clear to his shoulder, to see if perchance the nest be
not a foolishly shallow one and the eggs le within
reach of his paw—which suggests a monkey’s, by the
way, in its handlike flexibility.

Once, on the edge of a wild orchard, I saw him rob
a golden-winged woodpecker’s nest in this way. The
mother bird flew out as Mooweesuk came scratching
up the tree, which assured him that he would find
something worth while within. He stretched in a
paw, caught an egg and appeared to be rolling it up,
holding it against the side of the tunnel. When the
egg was almost up to the entrance he put in his nose
to see the treasure. Then it slipped and fell back,
and probably broke. He tried another, got it up
safely, and ate it whole where he was. He tried a
third, which slipped and broke like the first. At this,
with the taste of fresh egg in his mouth, he seemed to
grow impatient, or perhaps he got an idea from the
yellow streaks on his claws. He jabbed his paw down
hard so as to break all the eggs, and drew it up drip-
ping. He licked it clean with his tongue and put it
back again into the yellow mess at the bottom. This
was easy, and he kept it up until his moist paw
brought up only shells and rotten wood; whereupon
he backed away down the tree and shuffled off into

A Little Brother to the Bear 15

the woods, leaving a sad mess for a mother wood-
pecker to face behind him.

Another habit in which he has improved upon
Mooween is his fishing. He knows how to flip fish
out of water with his paw, as all bears do; but he has
also learned how to attract them when they are not to
be found on the shallows. Many times in the twilight
I have found Mooweesuk sitting very still on a rock
or gray log beside the pond or river, his soft colors
and his stillness making him seem like part of the
shore. Other naturalists and hunters have mentioned
the same thing, and their testimony generally agrees
in this: that Mooweesuk’s eyes are half shut at such
times, and his sensitive feelers, or whiskers, are play-
ing on the surface of the water. The fish below, see-
ing this slight motion but not seeing the animal above,
attracted either by curiosity or, more likely, by the
thought of insects playing, rise to the surface and are
snapped out by a sweep of Mooweesuk’s paw.

In a lecture, many years ago, Dr. Samuel Lock-
wood, a famous naturalist, first called attention to this
curious way of angling. Since then I have many
times seen Mooweesuk at his fishing; but I have
never been fortunate enough to see him catch any-
thing, though I have seen a wildcat do the trick per-
fectly in the same cunning way. Remembering his

16 A Little Brother to the Bear

fondness for fish, and the many places where I have
seen that he has eaten them, where the water was
plainly too deep to flip them out in the ordinary bear
way, I have no doubt whatever that Dr. Lockwood
has discovered the true secret of his patient waiting
above the pools where the fish are feeding.

There is another curious habit of the coon which
distinguishes him from the bear and from all other
animals. That is, his habit of washing, or rather of
sousing, everything he catches in water. No matter
what he finds to eat,—mice, chickens, roots, grubs,
fruit, everything, in fact, but fish,—he will take it to
water, if he be anywhere near a pond or brook, and
souse it thoroughly before eating. Why he does this
is largely a matter of guesswork. It is not to clean it,
for much of it is already clean; not to soften it, for clams
are soft enough as they are, and his jaws are powerful
enough to crush the hardest shells, yet he souses them
just the same before eating. Possibly it is to give things
the watery taste of fish, of which he is very fond; more
probably it is a relic, like the dog’s turning around
before he les down, or like the unnecessary migration
of most birds, the inheritance from some forgotten
ancestor that had a reason for the habit, and that lived
on the earth long, long years before there was any man
to watch him or to wonder why he did it.

A Little Brother to the Bear 7

Deep in the wilderness Mooweesuk is shy and alert
for danger, like most of the wild things there; but if
approached very quietly, or if he find you unexpect-
edly near him, he is filled with the Wood Folk’s
curiosity to know who you are. Once, on the long
tote-road from St. Leonards to the headwaters of the
Restigouche, I saw Mooweesuk sitting on a rock by
a trout brook diligently sousing something that he
had just caught. I crept near on all fours to the edge
of an old bridge, when the logs creaked under my
weight and he looked up from his washing and saw
me. He left his catch on the instant and came up
the brook, part wading, part swimming, put his fore-
paws on the low bridge, poked his head up over the
edge, and looked at me steadily, his face within ten
feet of mine. He disappeared after a few moments
and I crawled to the edge of the bridge to see what it
was that he was washing. A faint scratching made
me turn round, and there he was, his paws up on the
other edge of the bridge, looking back at the queer
man-thing that he had never seen before. He had
passed under the bridge to look at me from the other
side, as a fox invariably does if you keep still enough.
The game that he was washing was a big frog, and
after a few moments he circled the bridge, grabbed his
catch, and disappeared into the woods.

18 A Little Brother to the Bear

Near towns where he is much hunted Mooweesuk
has grown wilder, like the fox, and learned a hundred
tricks that formerly he knew nothing about. Yet
even here, if found young, he shows a strange fearless-
ness and even a rare confidence in man. Once, in the
early summer, I found a young coon at the foot of a
ledge, looking up at a shelf a few feet above his head
and whimpering because he could not get up. It was
a surprise to him, evidently, that his claws could not
make the same impression on the hard rock that they
did on the home tree in which he was born. He made
no objection — indeed, he seemed to take it as the
most natural thing in the world — when I picked him
up and put him on the shelf that he was whimpering
about; but in a moment, like a baby, he wanted to get
down again, and again I ministered to his necessities.
When I went away he followed after me whimpering,
forgetting his own den and his fellows in the ledge
hard by, and was not satisfied till I took him up, when
he curled down in the hollow of my arm and went to
sleep perfectly contented.

Presently he waked up, cocking his ears and twist-
ing his head, dog fashion, at some sound that was too
faint for my ears, and poked his inquisitive nose all
over me, even putting it down inside my collar, where
it felt like a bit of ice creeping about my neck. Not

«

A Luttle Brother to the Bear 19

till he had clawed his way inside my coat and put his
nose in my vest pocket did he find the cause of the
mysterious sounds which he heard. It was my watch
ticking, and in a moment he had taken it out and was
playing with the bright thing, as pleased as a child
with a new plaything. He made a famous pet, full of
tricks and drollery, catching chickens by pretending
to be asleep when they came stretching their necks
for the crumbs in his dish, playing possum when he
was caught in mischief, drinking out of a bottle, full
of joy when he could follow the boys to the woods,
where he ran wild with delight but followed them
home at twilight, and at last going off by himself to
his home tree to sleep away the winter —but I must
tell about all that elsewhere.

Like the bear, Mooweesuk is a peaceable fellow and
tends strictly to his own affairs as he wanders wide
through the woods. This is not from fear, for no ani-
mal, except perhaps the wolverine — who is a terrible
beast —is more careless of danger or faces it with
such coolness and courage when it appears. Of a dog
or two he takes little heed. If he hear them on his
trail, he generally climbs a tree to get out of the way;
for your dog, unlike his wild brother, the wolf, is a
meddlesome fellow and must needs be worrying every-

thing ; and Mooweesuk, like most other wild creatures,

20 A Little Brother to the Bear

loves peace, hunts only when hungry, and would always
prefer to avoid a row if possible. When caught on the
ground, or cornered, or roused to action by a sudden
attack, he backs up against the nearest tree or stone
to keep his enemies from getting at him from behind,
and then fights till he is dead, or till none of his ene-
mies are left to bother him, when he goes quietly on
his way again. No matter how great the odds or how
terribly he is punished, I have never seen a coon lose
his nerve or turn his back to run away. If the dogs
be many and he is near a pond or river, he will lead
them into deep water, where he is at home, and then
swimming rapidly in circles will close with them one
by one and put them out of the fight most effectively.
His method here seldom varies. He will whirl in
suddenly on the dog that he has singled out, grip him
about the neck with one arm, saw away at his head
with his powerful teeth, at the same time slashing
him across the eyes with his free claws, and then pile
his weight on the dog’s head to sink him under and
drown all the rest of the fight out of him. That is
generally enough for one dog; and Mooweesuk, with-
out a scratch and with his temper cool as ice, will
whirl like a flash upon his next victim.

Fortunately such troublous times are rare in Moo-
weesuk’s life, and the wilderness coon knows little

A A tttle Brother to the Bear 21

about them. His life from beginning to end is gener-
ally a peaceable one, full of good things to eat, and of
sleep and play and a growing knowledge of the woods.
He is born in the spring, a wee, blind, hairless little
fellow, like a mole or a bear cub. As he grows he
climbs to the entrance to his den, and will sit there as
at a window for hours at a time, just his nose and eye
visible, looking out on the new, bright, rustling world
of woods, and blinking sleepily in the flickering sun-
shine. Then come the long excursions with his mother,
at first by day when savage beasts are quiet, then at
twilight, and then at last the long night rambles, in
which, following his leader, he learns a hundred things
that a coon must know: to follow the same paths till
he comprehends the woods; to poke his inquisitive
nose into every crack and cranny, for the best morsels
on his bill of fare hide themselves in such places; to
sleep for a little nap when he is tired, resting on his
forehead so as to hide his brightly marked face and
make himself inconspicuous, like a rock or a lichen-
covered stump; to leap down from the tallest tree
without hurting himself; and when he uses a den in
the earth or rocks, to have an exit some distance away
from the entrance, and never under any circumstances
to enter his den save by his front door. There is great
wisdom in this last teaching. When a dog finds a

22 A Little Brother to the Bear

hole with a trail that always leads out of it he goes
away, knowing it is of no use to bark there; but when
he finds an opening into which a trail is leading, he
thinks of course that his game is inside, and proceeds
to howl and to dig without ever a thought in his fool-
ish head that there may be another way out. Mean-
while, as he digs and raises an unpardonable row in
the quiet woods, Mooweesuk will either wait just
inside the entrance till she gets a chance to nip the
dog’s nose or crush his paw, or else will slip quietly
out of the back door with her little ones and take them
off to a hollow tree where they can sleep in peace and
have no fear till the dog goes away.

By the time the first snows blow the little coons are
well grown and strong enough to take good care of
themselves; and then, like the bear again, they escape
the cold and the hunger of winter by going to sleep for ~
four or five months ina warm den that they have selected
carefully during their summer wanderings. They are
fat as butter when they curl themselves up for their long
sleep; their ringed tails cover their sensitive noses, and
if they waken for a time they suck their paws drowsily
till they sleep again; so that, like the bear, they are
often tender-footed when they come out in the spring.

Often the young coons of the same family sleep all
together in the same den. The old males prefer to

A Little Brother to the Bear 23

den by themselves, and are easily found; but the mother
coon, like the mother bear, takes infinite pains to hide
herself away where she can bring forth her young in
peace, and where no one will ever find them.

There is one curious habit suggested by these winter
dens that I have never seen explained, and for which
I cannot account satisfactorily. On certain soft days
in winter Mooweesuk wakes from his long sleep and
wanders off into the world. At times you may follow
his track for miles through the woods without finding
that he goes anywhere or does anything in particular,
for I have never found that he has eaten anything on
these wanderings. Sometimes, miles away from his
den, his track turns aside and goes straight to a hol-
low tree where other coons are spending the winter.
It may possibly be that they are his own family, who
generally have a den of their own, and whom he visits
to see if all is well. Sometimes from this den another
coon goes out with him, and their tracks wander for
miles together; more often he comes out alone, and
you follow to where he has visited other coons, or
gone to sleep in another tree of his own, or swung
round in a vast circle to the tree from which he
started, where he goes to sleep again till called out for
another season by the spring sun and the chickadee’s
love notes.

24 A Little Brother to the Bear

It may be that all this is a bit of pure sociability on
Mooweesuk’s part, for it is certainly not his season of
love-making or of finding a mate. Often, as I have
said, three or four cubs will sleep the winter out in the
same den; but again you may find two or three old
coons in the same tree. Unlike many other animals
with regard to their dens, the law of hospitality is
strong with the coon, and a solitary old fellow that
prefers to den by himself will never refuse to share
his winter house with other coons that are driven out
of their snug shelter; and this holds true notwith-
standing the fact that there are plenty other hollow
trees that seem to belong to the tribe in general, for
they are visited freely by every passing coon.

There is another way in which this love of his race is
manifest, and it brings a thrill of admiration for Moo-
-weesuk whenever it is seen: he always comes, in the
face of danger or death, to the cry of distress from one
of his own kind. I have seen this several times, and
once when it gave a thrill to the wild sport of night
hunting that had unexpected consequences. It was
near midnight in late November, at the end of the
hunting season. The dogs had treed a coon, and by
the aid of a bright fire of crackling brush we were try-
ing to “shine his eye,” that is, to locate the game in
the tree-tops by the fierce glow of his eyes flashing

A Little Brother to the Bear 25

back the firelight. We saw it at last, and one of the
hunters climbed the tree and tried to poke the coon
from his perch with a stout pole. Instead of doing
as was expected of him, Mooweesuk, who is always
cool in the face of any danger, came swiftly along the
limb showing his teeth, and with a snarl in his nose
that was unmistakable. The hunter dropped his pole,
_ pulled a revolver from his pocket, and shot the coon,
which in a sudden rage turned and leaped for the
howling dogs forty feet below. Ina flash there was a
terrible fight on. Mooweesuk, backed up against
a tree, began the cool swift snaps and blows that took
all the courage out of half his enemies. Nowa dog
was disabled by a single wolf grip on his sensitive
nose; now a favorite drew back howling, half-blinded
by a lightning sweep of Mooweesuk’s paw across both
eyes. But the dogs were too many for any one fighter,
however brave. They leaped in upon Mooweesuk
from the sides; two powerful dogs stretched him out;
then, knowing that his fight was almost lost, he twisted
his head and gave a sudden fierce cry, the help call,
entirely different from his screech and snarl of battle.
Like a flash another coon, a young one, appeared on
the scene, leaping out of the tree-top and hurling him-
self into the fight, clawing and snapping like a fury,
and sending out his battle yell.

26 A Little Brother to the Bear

Up to that moment none of us had suspected that
there was a second coon anywhere near. He had
remained hidden and safe in the tree-top through all
the uproar, until what seemed plainly a call for help
came, when he threw all thought of self aside and
came down like a hero.

We had not half realized all this when the little
fellow threw himself upon the dog that held the first
coon’s neck and crushed a paw with a single grip of
his powerful jaws. Then the bigger coon was on his
feet again fighting feebly. But a curious change had
come over the hunt. I had jumped forward to inter-
fere at the unexpected heroism, but had drawn back
at the thought that I was only a guest, and there by
courtesy. Near me stood a big hunter, an owner of
some of the dogs, whose face was twitching strangely
in the firelight. He started for the fight swinging a
club, then drew back ashamed to show any weak senti-
ment in a coon hunt. “Save him,” I whispered in his
ear, “the little fellow deserves his life”; and again he
_ jumped forward. “Drag off the dogs!” he roared
in a terrible voice, at the same time pulling away his
own. Every hunter understood. There was a sudden
wild yell with a thrill in it that made one’s spine tingle
gloriously. The dogs were dragged away by tails and
legs, struggling and howling against the indignity;

A Little Brother to the Bear 27

the big coon lay down quietly to die; but the little
fellow put his back up against a rock, his eyes glow-
- ing like coals that the wind blows upon, wrinkled his
nose like a wolf, and snarled his defiance at the whole
howling mob. And there he stayed till I took a pole
and amid laughs and cheers pushed him, still protest-

ing savagely, into another tree where the dogs could
“not get at him.

That was far away from the place where my first
Little Brother to the Bear lived, and many years had
passed since I had visited the ledge by the old beaver
dam. One day I came back, and turned swiftly into
the old wood road that had a happy memory for me
by every turn and rock and moldering stump. Here
was where the grouse used to drum; and there, at the
end of the log, were signs to tell me that it still some-
times rolled off the muffled thunder of the wings
above. Here was the break in the wall that the fox
used as a runway; and there was a crinkly yellow
hair caught on a rough rock telling its story mutely.
Here was where the pines stood thickest; but they
were all cut away now, and the hardwood seeds that
had waited so many years under the pines for their
chance at the sunlight were shooting up into vigorous
life at last. And here was the place where the road

28 A Little Brother to the Bear

twisted about to look back on the pretty spot where
the shy children lived, with whom I had once made
friends.

They were all gone, and the little house under the
ledge was deserted. In one of the tumble-down rooms
I found a rag doll beside the cold hearth, and some
poor toys on a shelf under a broken window. In the
whole lonely forgotten house these were the only
things that brought the light to one’s face and the
moisture to his eyes as he beheld them. All else
spoke of ruin and decay; but these poor playthings
that little hands had touched went straight to the
heart with an eternal suggesting of life and innocence
and a childhood that never grows old in the world.
I dusted them tenderly with my handkerchief and put
them back in their places, and went away softly down
the path that led to the other house where the Little
Brother to the Bear used to live.

Everything was changed here, too. The dam that
the beavers had built, and that the years had covered
over, still stood as strong as ever; but the woods had
been cut away, and the pond had dwindled till the wild
duck no longer found a refuge there. The ledges were
no longer green, for the sun that came in when the big
trees fell had killed most of the mosses and ferns that
decked them; and the brook’s song, though cheery

A Little Brother to the Bear 29

still, was scarcely heard as it trickled and seeped where
once it had rushed and tumbled down the woodsy
valley, which remained woodsy still, because happily
the soil there was too poor to raise anything but brush
and cowslips, and so the woodsmen had spared it from
desolation.

The old tree that had once been the coon’s house
was blown down. When it missed the support and
the wind-break of its fellows, it could not stand alone,
and toppled over in the first storm. The old claw
marks of Mooweesuk were hidden deep under lichens.
From this ruined home I went to the den among the
rocks by the path that the coons used to follow. The
hunters had been here long ago; the den was pried
open, the sheltering rocks were thrust aside, and the
interior was full of last year’s leaves. As I brushed
them away sadly to see what the house was like, my
hand struck something hard in a dark corner, and I
brought it out into the light again. It was a little
knot with a crook in it, all worn smooth by much
handling —the plaything that I had first seen, and
that was now the last memory of a home where the
Little Brothers to the Bear had once lived and played
together happily.

A | HITOOWEEK, the woodcock, the
a] strangest hermit in all the woods, is
a bird of mystery. Only the hunters
know anything about him, and they know him chiefly

a

as a glorious bird that flashes up to the alder tops
with a surprised twitter before their dogs, and poises
there a moment on whirring wings to get his bear-
ings, and then from his vantage-point at the moment
of his exultation he either falls down dead at the
bang of their guns and the rip of shot through the
screen of leaves, or else happily he slants swiftly
down to another hiding-place among the alders. To
the hunters, who are practically his only human
acquaintances, he is a game bird pure and simple, and
their interest is chiefly in his death. The details of

his daily life he hides from them, and from all others,
30

W hitooweek the Hermit 31

in the dark woods, where he spends all the sunny
hours, and in the soft twilight when he stirs abroad,
like an owl, after his long day’s rest. Of a hundred
farmers on whose lands I have found Whitooweek or
the signs of his recent feeding, scarcely five knew from
observation that such a bird existed, so well does he
play the hermit under our very noses.

~The reasons for this are many. By day he rests
on the ground in some dark bit of cover, by a brown
stump that exactly matches his feathers, or in a tangle
of dead leaves and brakes where it 1s almost impossible
to see him. At such times his strange fearlessness of
man helps to hide him, for he will let you pass within
a few feet of him without stirring. That is partly
because he sees poorly by day and perhaps does not
realize how near you are, and partly because he knows
that his soft colors hide him so well amidst his sur-
roundings that you cannot see him, however near you
come. This confidence of his is well placed, for once
I saw a man step over a brooding woodcock on her
nest in the roots of an old stump without seeing her,
and she never moved so much as the tip of her long
billas he passed. In the late twilight, when woodcock
first stir abroad, you see only a shadow passing swiftly
across a bit of clear sky as Whitooweek goes off to the
meadow brook to feed, or hear a rustle in the alders as

32 A Little Brother to the Bear

he turns the dead leaves over, and a faint peeunk, like
the voice of a distant night-hawk, and then you catch
a glimpse of a shadow.that flits along the ground, or
a weaving, batlike flutter of wings as you draw near
to investigate. No wonder, under such circumstances,
that Whitooweek passes all his summers and raises
brood upon brood of downy invisible chicks in a
farmers wood lot without ever being found out or
recognized.

My own acquaintance with Whitooweek began
when I was a child, when I had no name to give the
strange bird that I watched day after day, and when
those whom I asked for information laughed at my
description and said no such bird existed. It was
just beyond the upland pasture where the famous Old
Beech Partridge lived. On the northern slopes were
some dark, wet maple woods, and beyond that the
ground slanted away through scrub and alders to a
little wild meadow where cowslips grew beside the
brook. One April day, in stealing through the maple
woods, I stopped suddenly at seeing something shin-
ing like a jewel almost at my feet. It was an eye, a
bird’s eye; but it was some moments before I could
realize that it was really a bird sitting there on her
nest between the broken ends of an old stub that had
fallen years ago.

W hitooweek the Hermit 33

I backed away quietly and knelt down to watch
the queer find. Her bill was enormously long and
straight, and her eyes were ’way up at the back of
her head—that was the first observation. Some
-wandering horse had put his hoof down and made
a hollow in the dry rotten wood of the fallen stub.
Into this hollow a few leaves and brown grass stems
had been gathered, —a careless kind of nest, yet serv-
ing its purpose wonderfully, for it hid the brooding
mother so well that one might step on her without
ever knowing that bird or nest was near. This was
the second wondering observation, as I made out the
soft outlines of the bird sitting there, apparently with-
out a thought of fear, within ten feet of my face.

I went away quietly that day and left her undis-
turbed; and I remember perfectly that I took with
me something of the wonder, and something too of
the fear, with which a child naturally meets the wild
things for the first time. That she should be so still
and fearless before me was a perfect argument to a
child that she had some hidden means of defense —
the long bill, perhaps, or a hidden sting — with which
it was not well to trifle. All that seems very strange
and far away to me now; but it was real enough then
to a very small boy, alone in the dark woods, who met
for the first time a large bird with an enormously long

34 A Little Brother to the Bear

bill and eyes ’way up on the back of her head where
they plainly did not belong; a bird moreover that had
no fear and seemed perfectly well able to take care of
herself. So I went away softly and wondered about it.

Next day I came back again. The strange bird was
there on her nest as before, her long bill resting over
the edge of the hollow and looking like a twig at
the first glance. She showed no fear whatever, and
encouraged at her quietness and assurance I crept
nearer and nearer till I touched her bill with my fin-
ger and turned it gently aside. At this she wiggled
it impatiently, and my first child’s observation was
one that has only recently been noticed by natural-
ists, namely, that the tip of the upper bill is flexible
and can be moved about almost like the tip of a finger
in order to find the food that lies deep in the mud, and
seize it and drag it out of its hiding. At the same
time she uttered a curious hissing sound that fright-
ened me again and made me think of snakes and hid-
den stings; so I drew back and watched her from a
safe distance. She sat for the most part perfectly
motionless, the only movement being an occasional
turning of the long bill; and once when she had been
still a very long time, I turned her head aside again,
and to my astonishment and delight she made no
objection, but left her head as I had turned it, and

W hitooweek the Hermit 35

presently she let me twist it back again. After her
first warning she seemed to understand the situation
perfectly, and had no concern for the wondering child
that watched her and that had no intention whatever
of harming her or her nest. .
Others had laughed at my description of a brown
bird with a long bill and eyes at the back of her head
that let you touch her on her nest, so I said no more
to them; but at the first opportunity I hunted up
Natty Dingle and told him all about it. Natty was a
gentle, harmless, improvident little man, who would
never do any hard work for pay, —it gave him crzcks
in his back, he said,— but would cheerfully half kill
himself to go fishing through the ice, or to oblige a
neighbor. So far as he earned a living, he did it by
shooting and fishing and trapping and picking berries
in their several seasons, and by gathering dandelions
and cowslips (ewslops he called them) in the spring
and peddling them good-naturedly from door to door.
Most of his time, in pleasant weather, he spent in
roaming about the woods, or lying on his back by the
pond shore where the woods were thickest, fishing
lazily and catching fish where no one else could ever
get them, or watching an otters den on a stream
where no one else had seen an otter for forty years.
He knew all about the woods, knew every bird and

36 A Little Brother to the Bear

beast and plant, and one boy at least, to my knowl-
edge, would rather go with him for a day’s fishing
than see the President’s train or go to a circus.

Unlike the others, Natty did not laugh at my
description, but listened patiently and told me I had
found a woodcock’s nest, —a rare thing, he said, for
though he had roamed the woods so much, and shot
hundreds of the birds in season, he had never yet
chanced upon a nest. Next day he went with me, to
see the eggs, he said; but, as I think of it now, it was
probably with a view of locating the brood accurately
for the August shooting. As we rounded the end of
the fallen stub the woodcock’s confidence deserted her
at sight of the stranger, and she slipped away noise-
lessly into the leafy shadows. Then we saw her four
eggs, very big at one end, very little at the other, and
beautifully colored and spotted.

Natty, who was wise in his way, merely glanced at
the nest and then drew me aside into hiding, and before
we knew it, or had even seen her approach, Mother
Woodcock was brooding her eggs again. Then Natty,
who had doubted one part of my story, whispered to
me to go out; and the bird never stirred as I crept
near on hands and knees and touched her as before. ©

A few minutes later we crept away softly, and Natty
took me to the swamp to show me the borings, telling

W hitooweek the Hermit | ag

me on the way of the woodcock’s habits as he had seen
them in the fall hunting. The borings we found in
plenty wherever the earth was soft, — numerous holes,
as if made with a pencil, where the woodcock had
probed the earth with her long bill. She was hunt-
ing for earthworms, Natty told me,—a queer mistake
of his, and of all the bird books as well; for in the
primitive alder woods and swamps where the borings
are so often seen, there are no earthworms, but only
slugs and soft beetles and delicate white grubs. Wood-
cock hunt by scent and feeling, and also by listening
for the slight sounds made by the worms underground,
he told me, and that is why the eyes are far back on
the head, to be out of the way, and also to watch for
danger above and behind while the bird’s bill is deep
in the mud. And that also explains why the tip of
the bill is flexible, so that when the bird bores in the
earth and has failed to locate the game accurately by
hearing, the sensitive tip of the bill feels around, like
a finger, until it finds and seizes the morsel. All this
and many things more he told me as we searched
through the swamp for the signs of Mother Wood-
cock’s hunting and made our way home together in
the twilight. Some things were true, some erroneous ;
and some were a curious blending of accurate tradi-
tions and imaginative folk-lore from some unknown

38 A Little Brother to the Bear

source, such as is still held as knowledge of birds
and beasts in all country places; and these were
the most interesting of all to a child. And the boy
listened, as a devotee listens to a great sacred con-
cert, and remembered all these things and afterwards
sifted them and found out for himself what things
were true.

When I went back to the spot, a few days later, the
nest was deserted. A few bits of shell scattered about
told me the story, and that I must now hunt for the
little woodcocks, which are almost impossible to find
unless the mother herself show you where they are.
A week later, as I prowled along the edge of the
swamp, a sudden little brown whirlwind seemed to
roll up the leaves at my feet. In the midst of it I
made out the woodcock fluttering away, clucking, and
trailing now a wing and now a leg, as if desperately
hurt. Of course I followed her to see what was the
matter, forgetting the partridge that had once played
me the same pretty trick to decoy me away from her
chicks. When she had led me to a safe distance all
her injuries vanished as at the touch of magic. She
sprang up on strong wings, whirled across the swamp,
and circled swiftly back to where I had first started
her. But I did not find one of the little woodcocks,
though I hunted for them half an hour, and there

W hitooweek the Hermit 39

were four of them, probably, hiding among the leaves
and grass stems under my very eyes.

The wonderful knowledge gleaned from Natty
Dingle’s store and from the borings in the swamp
brought me into trouble and conflict a few weeks
later. Not far from me lived a neighbor's boy, a
budding naturalist, who had a big yellow cat named
Blink at his house. A queer old cat was Blink, and
the greatest hunter [ever saw. He knew, for instance,
where a mole could be found in his long tunnel, —and
that is something that still puzzles me,— and caught
scores of them; but, like most cats, he could never be
induced to taste one. When he caught a mole and
was hungry, he would hide it and go off to catch a
mouse or a bird; and these he would eat, leaving the
mole to be brought home as game. He would hunt
by himself for hours at a time, and come meowing
home, bringing everything he caught, — rats, squirrels,
rabbits, quail, grouse, and even grasshoppers when no
bigger game was afoot. Ata distance we would hear
his call, a peculiar yeow-yow that he gave only when
he had caught something, and the boy would run out
_ to meet him and take his game, while Blink purred
and rubbed against his legs to show his pride and
satisfaction. When no one met him he would go
meowing round the house once or twice and then

40 A Little Brother to the Bear

put his game under the door-step, where our noses
must speedily call it to our attention, for Blink would
never touch it again.

One day the boy found a strange bird under the
door-step, a beautiful brown creature, as large as a
pigeon, with a long, straight bill, and eyes at the top
of its head. He took it to his father, a dogmatic little
man, who gave him a queer mixture of truth and non-
sense as his portion of natural history. It was a blind
snipe, he said; and there was some truth in that. It
couldn’t see because its eyes were out of place; it was
a very scarce bird that appeared occasionally in the fall,
and that burrowed in the mud for the winter instead
of migrating, —and all this was chiefly nonsense.

When the boy took me to see his queer find I called
it a woodcock and began to tell about it eagerly, but
was stopped short and called a liar for my pains. A
wordy war followed, in which Natty Dingle’s authority
was invoked in vain; and the boy, being bigger than
I and in his own yard, drove me away at last for dar-
ing to tell him about a bird that his own cat had
caught and that his own father had called a blind
snipe. He pegged one extra stone after me for say-
ing that there were plenty of them about, only they
fed by night, like owls, and another stone for shout-
ing back that they did not burrow in the mud like

W hitooweek the Hermit Al

turtles in dry weather, as his oracle had declared.
And this untempered zeal is very much like what
one generally encounters when he runs up against
the prejudices of naturalists anywhere. Hear all they
say, —that the earth is flat, that swallows spend the
winter in the mud, that animals are governed wholly
by instinct, — but don’t quote any facts you may have
seen until the world is ready for them. For it is
better to call a thing a blind snipe, and know better,
than to raise a family row and be hit on the head with
a stone for calling it a woodcock.

The little woodcocks, though scarcely bigger than
. bumblebees, run about hardily, like young partridges,
the moment they chip the shell, and begin at once to
learn from the mother where to look for food. In the
early twilight, when they are less wild and the mother
is not so quick to flutter away and draw you after her,
I have sometimes surprised a brood of them, — wee,
downy, invisible things, each with a comically long
bill and a stripe down his back, which seems to divide
the little fellow and hide one half of him even after
you have discovered the other. The mother is with
them, and leads them swiftly among the bogs and
ferns and alder stems, where they go about turning
over the dead leaves and twigs and shreds of wet bark
with their bills for the grubs that hide beneath, like

42 A Little Brother to the Bear

a family of rag-pickers, each with a little stick to turn
things over. Mother and chicks have a contented little
twitter at such times that I have never heard under
any other circumstances, which is probably intended
to encourage each other and keep all the family within
hearing as they run about in the twilight.

When the feeding-grounds are far away from the
nest, as is often the case, Whitooweek has two habits
that are not found, I think, in any- other game birds
— except perhaps the plover; and I have never been
able to watch the young of these birds, though every
new observation of the old ones serves to convince
me that they are the most remarkable birds that visit .
us, and the least understood. When food must be
hunted for at a long distance, the mother will leave
her brood in hiding and go herself to fetch it. When
she returns she feeds the chicks, like a mother dove,
by putting her bill in their throats and giving each
his portion, going and coming until they are satisfied,
when she leaves them in hiding again and feeds for
herself during the rest of the night. Like most
other young birds and animals when left thus by
their mothers, they never leave the spot where they
have been told to stay, and can hardly be driven away
from it until the mother returns. And generally, when
you find a brood of young woodcock without the

W hitooweek the Hermit 43

mother, they will let you pick them up and will lie’
as if dead in your hand, playing possum, until you
put them down again.

When there is a good feeding-ground near at hand,
yet too far for the little chicks to travel, the mother
will take them there, one by one, and hide them in
a secret spot until she has brought the whole family.
Two or three times I have seen woodcock fly away
with their young; and once I saw a mother return to
the spot from which, a few moments before, she had
flown away with a chick and take another from under
a leaf where I had not seen him. This curious
method is used by the mothers not only to take the
young to favorable feeding-grounds, but also to get
them quickly out of the way when sudden danger
threatens, like fire or flood, from which it is im-
possible to hide.

So far as I can judge the process, which is always
quickly done and extremely difficult to follow, the
mother lights or walks directly over the chick and
holds him between her knees as she flies. This is
the way it seems to me after seeing it several times.
There are those—and they are hunters and keen
observers — who claim that the mother carries them
in her bill, as a cat carries a kitten; but how that is
possible without choking the little fellows is to me

A4 A Little Brother to the Bear

incomprehensible.’ The bill is not strong enough at
the tip, I think, to hold them by a wing; and to grasp
them by the neck, as in a pair of shears, and so to
carry them, would, it seems to me, most certainly suf-
focate or injure them in any prolonged flight; and
that is not the way in which wild mothers generally
handle their little ones.

There is another possible way in which Whitoo-
week may carry her young, though I have never seen
it. An old hunter and keen observer of wild life, with
whom I sometimes roam the woods, once stumbled
upon a mother woodcock and her brood by a little
brook at the foot of a wild hillside. One of the chicks
was resting upon the mother’s back, just as one often
sees a domestic chicken. At my friend’s sudden
approach the mother rose, taking the chick with her
on her back, and vanished among the thick leaves.
The rest of the brood, three of them, disappeared
instantly; and the man, after finding one of them,
went on his way without waiting to see whether the
mother returned for the rest. I give the incident for
what it is worth as a possible suggestion as to the
way in which young woodcock are carried to and fro;
but I am quite sure that those that have come under
my own observation were carried by an entirely
different method.

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The young woodcock begin to use their tiny wings
within a few days of leaving the eggs, earlier even
than young quail, and fly in a remarkably short time.
They grow with astonishing rapidity, thanks to their
good feeding, so that often by early summer the family
scatters, each one to take care of himself, leaving the
mother free to raise another brood. At such times
they travel widely in search of favorite food and come
often into the farm-yards, spending half the night about
the drains and stables while the house is still, and van-
ishing quickly at the first alarm; so that Whitooweek
is frequently a regular visitor in places where he is
never seen or suspected.

In his fondness for earthworms Whitooweek long
ago learned some things that a man goes all his life
without discovering, namely, that it is much easier
and simpler to pick up worms than to dig for them.
When a boy has to dig bait, as the price of going fish-
ing with his elders, he will often spend half a day, in
dry weather, working hard with very small results;
for the worms are deep in the earth at such times and
can be found only in favored places. Meanwhile the
father, who has sent his boy out to dig, will spend a
pleasant hour after supper in watering his green lawn.
The worms begin to work their way up to the surface
at the first patter of water-drops, and by midnight are

46 A Little Brother to the Bear

crawling about the lawn by hundreds, big, firm-bodied
fellows, just right for trout fishing. They stay on the
surface most of the night; and that is why the early
bird catches the worm, instead of digging him out, as
the sleepy fellows must do. Midnight is the best time
to go out with your lantern and get all the bait you
want without trouble or worry. That is also the time
when you are most likely to find Whitooweek at the
same occupation. Last summer I flushed two wood-
cock from my neighbor’s lawn in the late evening;
and hardly a summer goes by that you do not read
with wonder of their being found within the limits of
a great city like New York, whither they have come
from a distance by night to hunt the rich lawns over.
For the same fare of earthworms they visit the gardens
as well; and often in a locality where no wood-
cock are supposed to exist you will find, under the
cabbage leaves, or in the cool shade of the thick corn-
field, the round holes where Whitooweek has been
probing the soft earth for grubs and worms while
you slept.

When midsummer arrives a curious change comes
over Whitooweek; the slight family ties are broken,
and the bird becomes a hermit indeed for the rest of
the year. He lives entirely alone, and not even in the
migrating season does he join with his fellows in any

W hitooweek the Hermit 47

large numbers, as most other birds do; and no one, so
far as I know, has ever seen anything that might be
appropriately called a flock of woodcock. The only
exception to this rule that I know is when, on rare
occasions, you surprise a male woodcock strutting on
a log, like a grouse, spreading wings and tail, and hiss-
ing and sputtering queerly as he moves up and down.
Then, if you creep near, you will flush two or three
other birds that are watching beside the log, or in
the underbrush close at hand. One hunter told me
recently that his setter once pointed a bird on a fallen
log, that ceased his strutting as soon as he was dis-
covered and slipped down into the ferns. When the
dog drew nearer, five woodcock flushed at the same
moment, the greatest number that I have ever known
- being found together.

When I asked the unlearned hunter— who was yet
wise in the ways of the woods — the reason for Whitoo-
week’s strutting at this season, after the families have
scattered, he had no theory or explanation. “Just a
queer streak, same’s most birds have, on’y queerer,” he
said, and let it go at that. I have seen the habit but
once, and then imperfectly, for I blundered upon two
-or three birds and flushed them before I could watch
the performance. It is certainly not to win his mate,
for the season for that is long past; and unless it be a

48 A Little Brother to the Bear

suggestion of the grouse habit of gathering in small
bands for a kind of rude dance, I am at a loss to account
for it. Possibly play may appeal even to Whitooweek,
as it certainly appeals to all other birds; and it is play
alone that can make him forget he is a hermit.

With the beginning of the molt the birds desert the
woods and swamps where they were reared and dis-
appear absolutely. Whither they go at this time is
a profound mystery. In places where there were a
dozen birds yesterday there are none to-day; and
when ‘you do stumble upon one it is generally in a
spot where you never found one before, and where you
will probably not find another, though you haunt the
spot for years. This is the more remarkable in view
of the fact that the woodcock, like most other birds,
has certain favored spots to which he returns, to nest
or feed or sleep, year after year.

Occasionally at this season you may find a solitary
bird on a dry southern hillside, or on the sunny edge
of the big woods. He is pitiful now to behold, having
scarcely any feathers left to cover him, and can only
flutter or run away at your approach. If you have
the rare fortune to surprise him now when he does
not see you, you will note a curious thing. He stands
beside a stump or brake where the sun can strike his
bare back fairly, as if he were warming himself at

W hitooweek the Hermit AQ

nature’s fireplace. His long bill rests its tip on the
ground, as if it were a prop supporting his head.
He is asleep; but if you crawl near and bring your
glasses to bear, you will find that he sleeps with half
an eye open. The lower lid seems to be raised till it
covers half the eye; but the upper half is clear, so
that as he sleeps he can watch above and behind for
his enemies. He gives out very little scent at such
times, and your keen-nosed dog, that would wind him
at a stone’s throw in the autumn, will now pass close
by without noticing him, and must almost run over
the bird before he draws to a point or shows any
signs that game is near.

Hunters say that these scattered birds are chee
that have lost the most feathers, and that they keep to
the sunny open spots for the sake of getting warm.
Perhaps they are right; but one must still ask the
question, what do these same birds do at night when
the air is colder than by day? And, as if to contra-
dict the theory, when you have found one bird on a
sunny open hillside, you will find the next one a mile
away asleep in the heart of a big corn-field, where the
sun barely touches him the whole day long.

Whatever the reason for their action, these birds
that you discover in July are rare, incomprehensible
individuals. The bulk of the birds disappear, and you

”

50 A Little Brother to the Bear

cannot find them. Whether they scatter widely to
dense hiding-places and by sitting close escape discoy-
ery, or whether, like some of the snipe, they make a
short northern migration in the molting season in
search of solitude and a change of food, is yet to be
discovered. For it is astonishing how very little we
know of a bird that nests in our cow pasture and that
often visits our yards and lawns nightly, but whose
acquaintance we make only when he is dead and
served as a delicious morsel, hot on toast, on our
dining-tables.

In the spring, while winning his mate, Whitooweek
has one habit which, when seen at the edge of the
alder patch, reminds you instantly of the grass-plovers
of the open moors and uplands, and of their wilder
namesakes of the Labrador barrens. Indeed, in his
fondness for burned plains, where he can hide in plain
sight and catch no end of grasshoppers and crickets
without trouble to vary his diet, and in a swift change-
ableness and fearlessness of man, Whitooweek has
many points in common with the almost unknown
plovers. In the dusk of the evening, as you steal
along the edge of the woods, you will hear a faint
peenk, peenk close beside you, and as you turn to listen
and locate the sound a woodcock slants swiftly up
over your head and begins to whirl in a spiral towards

W hitooweek the Hermit — 51

the heavens, clucking and twittering ecstatically. It
is a poor kind of song, not to be compared with that of
the oven-bird or grass-plover, who do the same thing
at twilight, and Whitooweek must help his voice by
the clicking of his wings and by the humming of air
through them, like the sharp voice of a reed in windy
weather; but it sounds sweet enough, no doubt, to the
little brown mate who is standing perfectly still near
you, watching and listening to the performance. At
an enormous height, for him, Whitooweek whirls about
madly for a few moments and then retraces his spiral
downwards, clucking and twittering the while, until he
reaches the tree-tops, where he folds his wings directly
over his mate and drops like a plummet at her head.
Still she does not move, knowing well what is coming,
and when within a few feet of the ground Whitooweek
spreads his wings wide to break his fall and drops
quietly close beside her. There he remains quite still
for a moment, as if exhausted; but the next moment
he is strutting about her, spreading wings and tail like
a wild turkey-gobbler, showing all his good points to
the best advantage, and vain of all his performances
-as a peacock in the spring sunshine. Again he is
quiet; a faint peexk, peenk sounds, as if it were a mile
away; and again Whitooweek slants up on swift wings
to repeat his ecstatic evolutions.

52 A Little Brother to the Bear

Both birds are strangely fearless of men at such
times; and if you keep still, or move very softly if you
move at all, they pay no more attention to you than if
you were one of the cattle cropping the first bits of
grass close at hand. Like the golden plover, whose
life is spent mostly in the vast solitudes of Labrador
and Patagonia, and whose nature is a curious mixture
of extreme wildness and dense stupidity, they seem to
have no instinctive fear of any large animal; and what-
ever fear Whitooweek has learned is the result of
persistent hunting. Even in this he is slower to learn
than any other game bird, and when let alone for a
little season promptly returns to his native confidence.

When the autumn comes you will notice another
suggestion of the unknown plover in Whitooweek.
Just as you look confidently for the plover’s arrival in
the first heavy northeaster after August 20, so the first
autumn moon that is obscured by heavy fog will surely
bring the woodcock back to his accustomed haunts
again. But why he should wait for a full moon, and
then for a chill mist to cover it, before beginning his
southern flight, is one of the mysteries. Unlike the
plovers that come by hundreds, and whose eerie cry,
shrilling above the roar of the storm and the rush of
rain, brings you out of your bed at midnight to thrill
and listen and thrill again, Whitooweek slips in

W hitooweek the Hermit 53

silent and solitary; and you go out in the morning, as
to an appointment, and find him sleeping quietly just
where you expected him to be.

With the first autumn flight another curious habit
comes out, namely, that Whitooweek has a fondness
for certain spots, not for any food or protection they
give him, but evidently from long association, as a
child loves certain unkempt corners of an upland
pasture above twenty other more beautiful spots that
one would expect him to like better. Moreover, the
scattered birds, in some unknown way, seem to keep
account of the place, as if it were an inn, and so long
as they remain in the neighborhood will often keep
this one particular spot filled to its full complement.

Some three miles north of where I write there is a
certain small patch of tall open woods that a few
hunters have known and tended for years, while others
passed by carelessly, for it is the least likely looking
spot for game in the whole region. Yet if there is but
a single woodcock in all Fairfield County, in these
days of many hunters and few birds, the chances are
that he will be there; and if you do not find one there
on the first morning after a promising spell of weather,
you may be almost certain that the flight is not yet
on, or has passed you by. Several times after flushing
a solitary woodcock in this spot I have gone over the

54 A Little Brother to the Bear

whole place to find some reason for Whitooweek’s
strange fancy; but all in vain. The ground is open
and stony, with hardly a fern or root or grass tuft to
shelter even a woodcock; and look as closely as you
will you can find no boring or sign of Whitooweek’s
feeding. From all external appearances it is the last
spot where you would expect to find such a bird, and
there are excellent covers close at hand; yet here
is where Whitooweek loves to lie during the day, and
to this spot he will return as long as there are any
woodcock left. Hunters may harry the spot to-day
and kill the few rare birds that still visit it; but
to-morrow, if there be any birds in the whole neigh-
borhood, there will be practically the same number
just where the first were killed.

I have questioned old gunners about this spot, —
which I discovered by flushing two woodcock at a
time when none were to be found, though they were
searched for by a score of young hunters and dogs, —
and find that it has been just so as long as they can
remember. Years ago, when the birds were plenty
and little known, five or six might be found here ona
half-acre at any time during the flight. If these were
killed off, others took their places, and the supply
seemed to be almost a constant quantity as long as
there were birds enough in the surrounding coverts

W hitooweek the Hermit 55

to draw upon; but why they haunt this spot more
than others, and why the vacant places are so quickly
filled, are two questions that no man can answer.

One hunter suggests to me, doubtfully, that possibly
this may be accounted for by the migrating birds that
are moving southward during the flight, and that drop
into the best unoccupied places; and the same expla-
nation will occur to others. The objection to this is
that the birds migrate by night, and by night this
spot is always unoccupied. The woodcock use it for
a resting-place only by day, and by night they scatter
widely to the feeding-grounds, whither also the migrat-
ing birds first make their way; for Whitooweek must
feed often, his food being easily digested, and can prob-
ably make no sustained flights. He seems to move
southward by easy stages, feeding as he goes; and so
the new-comers would meet the birds that lately occu-
pied the spot on the feeding-grounds, if indeed they
met them at all, and from there would come with them
at daylight to the resting-places they had selected. But
how do the new-comers, who come by night, learn that
the favored spots are already engaged by day, or that
some of the birds that occupied them yesterday are
now dead and their places vacant?

The only possible explanation is either to say that
it is a matter of chance — which is no explanation at

56 A Little Brother to the Bear

all, and foolish also; for chance, if indeed there be any
such blind unreasonable thing in a reasonable world,
does not repeat itself regularly —or to say frankly that
there is some definite understanding and communi-
cation among the birds as they flit to and fro in the
night; which is probably true, but obviously impossible
to prove with our present limited knowledge.

This fondness for certain spots shows itself in
another way when you are on the trail of the hermit.
When flushed from a favorite resting-place and not
shot at, he makes but a short flight, up to the brush
tops and back again, and then goes quietly back to
the spot from which he rose as soon as you are gone
away. He has also the hare trick of returning in a
circle to his starting-point; and occasionally, when you
flush a bird and watch sharply, you may see him slant
down on silent wings behind you and light almost at
your heels. Once my old dog Don started a wood-
cock and remained stanchly pointing at the spot where
he had been. I remained where I was, a few yards in
the rear, and ina moment Whitooweek whirled in from
behind and dropped silently into some brakes between
me and the dog and not ten feet from the old setter’s
tail. ‘The ruse succeeded perfectly, for as the scent
faded away from Don’s nose he went forward, and so
missed the bird that was watching him close behind.

W hitooweek the Hermit ay

This curious habit may be simply the result of
Whitooweek’s fondness for certain places; or it may
be that by night he carefully selects the spot where
he can rest and hide during the day, and returns to it
because he cannot find another so good while the sun
dazzles his eyes; or it may be a trick pure and simple
to deceive the animal that disturbs him, by lighting
close behind where neither dog nor man will ever
think of looking for him.
| By night, when he sees perfectly and moves about
rapidly from one feeding-ground to another, Whitoo-
week is easily dazzled by a light of any kind, and he
is one of the many creatures that come and go within
the circle of your jack. Because he 1s silent at such
times, and moves swiftly, he is generally unnamed —
just a night bird, you think, and let him pass without
another thought. Several times when Jacking, to see
what birds and animals I might surprise and watch by
night, I have recognized Whitooweek whirling wildly
about my circle of light. Once, deep in the New
Brunswick wilderness, I surprised two poachers spear-
ing salmon at midnight with a fire-basket hung over
the bow of their canoe. Spite of its bad name it isa
magnificent performance, skillful and daring beyond
measure; so instead of driving them off I asked for a
seat in their long dugout to see how it was done.

58 A Little Brother to the Bear

As we swept up and down the dangerous river, with
pitch-pine blazing and crackling and the black shadows
jumping about us, two woodcock sprang up from the
shore and whirled madly around the pirogue. One
brushed my face with his wings, and was driven away
only when Sandy in the bow gave a mighty lunge of
his spear and with a howl of exultation flung a twenty-
pound, kicking salmon back into my lap. But several
times that night I saw the flash of their wings, or heard
their low surprised twitter above the crackle of the fire
and the rush and roar of the rapids.

When he finds good feeding-grounds on his south-
ern migrations, Whitooweek will stay with us, if undis-
turbed, until a sharp frost seals up his storehouse by
making the ground too hard for his sensitive bill to
penetrate. Then he slips away southward to the next
open spring or alder run. Not far away, on Shippan
Point, is a little spring that rarely freezes and whose
waters overflow and make a green spot even in mid-
winter. The point is well covered with houses now,
but formerly it was good woodcock ground, and the
little spring always welcomed a few of the birds with
the welcome that only a spring can give. Last year,
at Christmas time, I found a woodcock there quite at
home, within a stone’s throw of two or three houses,
and with snow lying deep all around him. He had

W hitooweek the Hermit 59

lingered there weeks after all other birds had gone,
either held by old associations and memories of a
time when only the woodcock knew the place; or
else, wounded and unable to fly, he had sought out
the one spot in all the region where he might live
and be fed until his wing should heal. Nature, whom
men call cruel, had cared for him tenderly, healing his
wounds that man had given, and giving him food and
a safe refuge at a time when all other feeding-grounds
were held fast in the grip of winter; but men, who can
be kind and reasonable, saw no deep meaning in it all.
The day after I found him a hunter passed that way,
and was proud of having killed the very last woodcock
of the season.

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I HERE is one astonishing thing about Whitoo-
week which can scarcely be called a habit, but which
is probably the discovery of one or two rare individuals
here and there more original than their fellows. Like
the eider-ducks and the bear and the beaver, Whitoo-
week sometimes uses a rude kind of surgery for bind-
ing up his wounds. Twenty years ago, while sitting
quietly by a brook at the edge of the woods, in Bridge-
water, a woodcock suddenly fluttered out into the open
and made his way to a spot on the bank where a light
streak of sticky mud and clay showed clearly from
where I was watching. It was the early hunting sea-
son and gunners were abroad in the land, and my first
impression was that this was a wounded bird that had
made a long flight after being shot, and that had now

come out to the stream to drink or to bathe his wound.
60

A Woodcock Genius 61

Whether this were so or not is a matter of guesswork ;
but the bird was acting strangely in broad daylight,
and I crept nearer till I could see him plainly on the
other side of the little stream, though he was still too
far away for me to be absolutely sure of what all his
motions meant.

At first he took soft clay in his bill from the edge
of the water and seemed to be smearing it on one leg
near the knee. Then he fluttered away on one foot
for a short distance and seemed to be pulling tiny
roots and fibers of grass, which he worked into the
clay that he had already smeared on his leg. Again
he took more clay and plastered it over the fibers,
putting on more and more till I could plainly see the
enlargement, working away with strange, silent intent-
ness for fully fifteen minutes, while I watched and
wondered, scarce believing my eyes. Then he stood
perfectly still for a full hour under an overhanging
sod, where the eye could with difficulty find him, his
only motion meanwhile being an occasional rubbing
and smoothing of the clay bandage with his bill, until
it hardened enough to suit him, whereupon he fluttered
away from the brook and disappeared in the thick
woods.

I had my own explanation of the incredible action,
namely, that the woodcock had a broken leg, and had

62 A Little Brother to the Bear

deliberately put it into a clay cast to hold the broken
bones in place until they should knit together again;
but naturally I kept my own counsel, knowing that
no one would believe in the theory. For years I
questioned gunners closely, and found two who said
that they had killed woodcock whose legs had at one
time been broken and had healed again. As far as
they could remember, the leg had in each case healed
perfectly straight instead of twisting out to one side,
as a chicken’s leg does when broken and allowed to
knit of itself. I examined hundreds of woodcock in
the markets in different localities, and found one whose
leg had at one time been broken by a shot and then
had healed perfectly. There were plain signs of dried
mud at the break; but that was also true of the other
leg near the foot, which only indicated that the bird
had been feeding in soft places. All this proved
nothing to an outsider, and I kept silence as to what
I had seen until last winter, twenty years afterwards,
when the confirmation came unexpectedly. I had been
speaking of animals before the Contemporary Club of
Bridgeport when a gentleman, a lawyer well known
all over the state, came to me and told me eagerly of
a curious find he had made the previous autumn. He
was gunning one day with a friend, when they shot a
woodcock, which on being brought in by the dog was

AA Woodcock Genius 63

found to have a lump of hard clay on one of its legs.
Curious to know what it meant he chipped the clay
off with his penknife and found a broken bone, which
was then almost healed and as straight as ever. A few
weeks later the bird, had he lived, would undoubtedly
have taken off the cast himself and there would have
been nothing to indicate anything unusual about him.

So I give the observation now, at last, since proof
is at hand, not to indicate a new or old habit of Whit-
ooweek,—for how far the strange knowledge is spread
among the woodcock and the wading birds no man can
say, — but simply to indicate how little we know of the
inner life of the hermit, and indeed of all wild birds,
and how much there is yet to be discovered when we
shall lay aside the gun for the field-glass and learn to
interpret the wonderful life which goes on unseen all
about us.’

1 Since the above observation was published, several cases have been
brought to my attention which prove conclusively that this habit of setting
a broken leg in a clay cast is more widespread among woodcock and snipe
than. I had believed possible. In an article in Sczence (May 13, 1904,

Vol. XIX, N.S., No. 489, pp. 760 ff.) I have mentioned a few of these cases
and given the evidence that supports them.

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western mountains and the shadows
stretched long and chill through the snow-laden woods,
a huge bull moose broke out of the gloom of the
spruces and went swinging up the long, sunlit barren
at a stride whose length and power would have dis-
couraged even a wolf from following. Five minutes
later I came out of the same tunnel under the spruces
just asthe fringe of green across the barren swished
back to cover the flanks of the plunging bull, and then
nodded and nodded in twenty directions — 7hzs way /
that way! here! yonder /—to mislead any that might
follow on his track. For at times even the hemlocks
and the alders, the waters and the leaves, the creak-

ing boughs and the dancing shadows, all seem to
64

When Upweekis Goes Hunting 65

conspire to shield the innocent Wood Folk from the
hostile eyes and hands of those that pursue them.
And that is one reason why it is so hard to see game
in the woods.

The big moose had fooled me that time. When he
knew that I was following him he ran far ahead, and
then circled swiftly back to stand motionless in a hill-
side thicket within twenty yards of the trail that he
had made scarcely an hour agone. There he could
see perfectly, without being seen, what it was that was
_following him. When I came by, following swiftly
and silently the deep tracks in the snow, he let me
pass below him while he took a good look and a sniff
at me; then he glided away like a shadow in the oppo-
site direction. Unfortunately a dead branch under
the snow broke with a dull snap beneath his cautious
hoof, and I turned aside from the trail to see what it
was that had snapped the twig — and so saved myself
the long tramp up and down the cunning trails.
When he saw that his trick was discovered he broke
away for the open barren, with all his wonderful
powers of eye and ear and tireless legs alert to save
himself from the man whom he mistook for his deadly
enemy.

It was of small use to follow him farther, so I sat
down on a prostrate yellow birch to rest and listen

66 A Little Brotherdo ae Bae

awhile in the vast silence, and to watch anything that
might be passing through the cold white woods.
Under the fringe of evergreen the soft purple
shadows jumped suddenly, and a hare as white as the
snow bounded out. In long nervous jumps, like a
bundle of wire springs, he went leaping before my face
across a narrow arm of the barren to the shelter of a
point below. The soft arms of the ground spruces
and the softer shadows beneath them seemed to open
of their own accord to let him in. All nodding of
branches and dropping of snow pads and jumping.
of shadows ceased instantly, and all along the fringe
of evergreen silent voices were saying, There is noth-
ing here; we have not seen him; there is nothing here.
Now why did he run that way, I thought; for
Moktaques is a crazy, erratic fellow and never does
things in a businesslike way unless he has to. As I
wondered, there was a gleam of yellow fire under the
purple shadows whence Moktaques had come, and the
fierce round head of a Canada lynx was thrust out of
the tunnel that the hare had made only a moment
before. His big gray body had scarcely pushed itself
into sight when the shadows stirred farther down the
fringe of evergreen; another and another lynx glided
out; and I caught my breath as five of the savage
creatures swept across the narrow arm of the barren,

When Upweekis Goes Hunting 67

each with his head thrust out, his fierce eyes piercing
the gloom ahead like golden lances, and holding his
place in the stately, appalling line of fierceness and
power as silent as the shadow of death. My nerves
shivered at the thought of what would happen to
Moktaques when one of the line should discover and
jump him. Indeed, having no rifle, I was glad enough
myself to sit very still and let the savage creatures go
by without finding me. es

The middle lynx, a fierce old female, was following
the hare’s trail; and in a moment it flashed across me
who she was, and what they were all doing. Here, at
last, was the secret of the lynx bands that one some-
times finds in the winter woods, and that occasionally
threaten or appall one with a ferocity that the indi-
vidual animals never manifest. For Upweekis, though
big and fierce, is at heart a slinking, cowardly, treach-
erous creature, like all cats, and so loves best to be
alone. Knowing that the rest of his tribe are like
himself, he suspects them all and is fearful that in any
division of common spoils somebody else would get the
lion’s share. And so I have never found among the
cats any trace of the well-defined regulations that seem
to prevail among nearly all other animals.

In winter, however, it is different. Then neces-
sity compels Upweekis to lay aside some of his feline

68 A Little Brother to the Bear

selfishness and hunt in small bands. Every seven
years, especially, when rabbits are scarce in the woods
because of the sickness that kills them off periodically,
you may stumble upon one of these pirate crews
haunting the deer yards or following after the caribou
herds; but until the ferocious line swept out of the
purple shadows under my very eyes I had no idea that
these bands are —almost invariably, as I have since
learned — family parties that hold together through
the winter, just as fawns follow the old doe until the
spring comes, in order that her wisdom may find them
food, and her superior strength break a way for them
when snows are deep and enemies are hard at heel.
The big lynx in the middle was the mother; the four
other lynxes were her cubs; and they held together
now, partly that their imperfect education might be
finished under her own eyes, but chiefly that in the
hungry winter days they might combine their powers
and hunt more systematically, and pull down, if need be,
the larger animals that might defy them individually.
As she crossed the fresh trail of the bull moose the
old mother lynx thrust her big head into it for a long
sniff. The line closed up instantly and each lynx
stood like a statue, his blunt nose down into a reeking
hoof mark, studying through dull senses what it was
that had just passed. For Upweekis has a poor nose,

When Upweekis Goes Hunting 69

and never quite knows whether to believe or distrust
its report. The old lynx swung her head up and down
the line of her motionless cubs; then with a ferocious
snarl curling under her whiskers she pushed forward
again. A score of starving lynxes all together would
scarcely follow a bull of that stride and power. Only
the smell of blood would drag them unwillingly along
such a trail; and even then, if they overtook the author
of it, they would only squat around him ina fierce solemn
circle, yawning hungrily and hoping he would die.
Now, somewhere just ahead, easier game was hiding
at the end of a trail that they could follow easily with
their eyes. An unvoiced command seemed to run up
and down the line of waiting cubs. Each thrust his head
out at the same instant and the silent march went on.

When the last of the line had glided out of sight
among the bushes of the point below, I ran swiftly
through the woods, making no noise in the soft snow,
and crouched motionless under the spruces on the
lower side of the point, hoping to see the cunning
hunters again. There was but a moment to wait.
From under a bending evergreen tip Moktaques
leaped out and went flying across the open for the
next wooded point. Close behind him sounded a
snarl, and with a terrific rush as she sighted the
game the old lynx burst out, calling savagely to her

70 A Little Brother to the Bear

line of hunters to close in. Like the blast of a squall
they came, stretching out in enormous bounds and
closing in from either end so as to cut off the circling
run of the flying game. Ina flash the two ends of the
line had met and whirled in sharply; in another flash
Moktaques was crouching close in the snow in the
center of a fierce circle that rolled in upon him like a
whirlwind. As the smallest lynx leaped for his game
an electric shock seemed to touch the motionless hare.
He shot forward as if galvanized, leaping high over the
crouching terror before him, striving to break out of
the terrible circle. Then the lynx over whose head he
passed leaped straight up, caught the flying creature
fairly in his great paws, fell over backwards, and was
covered in an instant by the other lynxes that hurled
themselves upon him like furies, snapping and clawing
ferociously at the mouthful which he had pulled down
at the very moment of its escape.

There was an appalling scrimmage for a moment;
then, before I could fairly rub my eyes, the hare had
vanished utterly, and a savage ring of lynxes were
licking their chops hungrily, glaring and growling at
each other to see which it was that had gotten the
biggest mouthful.

When they disappeared at last, slinking away in a
long line under the edge of the barren, I took up the

When Upweekis Goes Hunting 71

back track to see how they had been hunting. Fora
full mile, straight back toward my camp, I followed the
tracks and read the record of as keen a bit of bush-
beating as was ever seen in the woods. They had
swept along all that distance in an almost perfect line,
starting every living thing that lay athwart their path.
Here it was a ruffed grouse that one had jumped -for
and missed, as the startled bird whirred away into the
gloom. There one had climbed a tree and shaken
something off into the snow, where the others licked
up every morsel so clean that I could not tell what the
unfortunate creature was; but a curious bit of savage
daring was manifest, for the lynx that had gone up
the tree after the game had hurled himself down like
a catapult, leaving a huge hole in the snow, so as to
be in at the death before his savage fellows, which had
come flying in with great bounds, should have eaten
everything and left not even a smell for his own share.
And there, at last, at the very end of the line, another
hare had been started and, running in a short circle,
as hares often do, had been met and seized by the fourth
_ lynx as the long line swung in swiftly to head him off.

Years later, and miles away on the Renous barrens,
I saw another and more wonderful bit of the same keen
hunting. From a ridge above a small barren I saw a
herd of caribou acting strangely and went down to

92 A Little Brother to the Bear

investigate. As I reached the fringe of thick bushes
that lined the open I saw the caribou cluster excitedly
about the base of a big rock across the barren, not
more than two hundred yards away. Something was
there, evidently, which excited their curiosity, — and
caribou are the most inquisitive creatures, at times, in
all.the woods, —but I had to study the rock sharply
through my field-glasses before I made out the round
fierce head of a big lynx pressed flat against the gray
stone. One side of the rock was almost perpendicu-
lar, rising sheer some fifteen or twenty feet above the
plain; the other side slanted off less abruptly toward
the woods; and the big lynx, which had _ probably
scrambled up from the woods to spy on the caribou,
was now hanging half over the edge of rock, swaying
his savage head from side to side and stretching one
wide paw after another at the animals beneath.

The caribou were getting more excited and curious
every moment. Caribou are like turkeys; when they
see some new thing they must die or find out about
it. Now they were spreading and closing their ranks,
wavering back and forth, stretching ears and noses at
the queer thing on the rock, but drawing nearer and
nearer with every change.

Suddenly the lynx jumped, not at the caribou, for
they were still too far away, but high in the air with

When Upweekis Goes Hunting 73

paws outspread. He came down in a flurry of snow,
whirled round and round as if bewitched, then van-

ished silently in two great jumps into the shelter of

the nearest evergreens.

The caribou broke wildly at the strange sight, but
turned after a startled bound or two to see what it was
that had frightened them. There was nothing in sight,
and like a flock of foolish sheep they came timidly back,
nosing the snow and stretching their ears at the rock
again; for there at the top was the big lynx, swinging
his round head from side to side as before, and reach-
ing his paws alternately at the herd, as if to show them
how broad and fine they were.

Slowly the little herd neared the rock and the lynx
drew back, as if to lure them on. They were full of
burning curiosity, but they had seen one spring, at
least, and measured its power, and so kept at a respect-
ful distance. Then one young caribou left the others
and went nosing along the edge of the woods to find
the trail of the queer thing, or get to leeward of the
rock, and so find out by smell — which is the only
sure sense that a caribou possesses — what it was all
about. A wind seemed to stir a dried tuft of grass on
the summit of the great rock. I put my glasses upon
it instantly, then caught my breath in suppressed excite-
ment as I made out the tufted ears of two or three other

?

74 A Little Brother to the Bear

lynxes crouching flat on their high tower, out of sight
of the foolish herd, but watching every movement with
fierce, yellow, unblinking eyes.

The young caribou found the trail, put his nose
down into it, then started cautiously back toward the
rock to nose the other hole in the snow and be sure
that it smelled just like the first one. Up on the rock
the big lynx drew further back; the herd pressed close,
raising their heads high to see what he was doing; and
the young caribou stole up and put his nose down
into the trail again. Then three living catapults shot
over the high rim of the rock and fell upon him. Like
a flash the big lynx was on his feet, drawing himself
up to his full height and hurling a savage screech of
exultation after the flying herd. Then he, too, shot
over the rock, fell fair on the neck of the struggling
young caribou, and bore him down into the snow.

Upweekis is a stupid fellow. He will poke his head
into a noose as foolishly as any rabbit, and then he will
fight with the pole at the other end of the noose until
he chokes himself. But no one could follow that trail
in the snow without a growing respect for the shadowy |
creature of the big round tracks that wander, wander
everywhere through the winter woods, and without
wondering intensely in what kind of savage school
Mother Upweekis trains her little ones.

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Ve ‘DUNK the Fat One, as Simmo calls him,
m7 came out of his winter den the morning
AW\\ after the Reverend James had stirred the
sod of his first flower bed. It was early
April, and the first smell of spring was in the air —
that subtle call of Mother Earth to her drowsy children
to awake and come out and do things. The Reverend
James felt the call in his nose and, remembering his
boyhood, as we all do at the smell of spring, resolved
to go fishing after he had finished his morning paper.
His wife felt it, went to the door, took a long breath
ame. cried, “Isn't this.:just glorious!” Then she
grabbed a trowel—for when a man must off to the
brook for his first trout, a woman, by the same inner

compulsion, must dig in the earth—and started for
75

76 A Little Brother to the Bear

the flower bed. A moment later her excited call came
floating in through the open window.

“ Ja-a-a-a-mes? James!” —the first call with a long
up slide, the second more peremptory — “ what in the
world did you plant in this flower bed?”

“Why,” said the Reverend James, peering quiz-
zically over the rim of his spectacles at the open
window, “ why, I thought I planted portulaca seed.”

“Then come out here and see what’s come up,”
ordered his wife; and the surprised old gentleman
came hurriedly to the door to blink in astonishment
at three fat toads, which were also blinking in the
warm sunshine, and a huge mud-turtle that was
sprawling and hissing indignantly in a great hole
in the middle of his flower bed.

A sly, whimsical twinkle was under the old minister’s
spectacles as he regarded the queer crop that had come
up overnight. “ Whatsoever a man soweth, whatsoever
a man soweth,” he quoted softly to himself, eying the
three toads askance, and poking the big turtle inquisi-
tively, but snapping his hand back at sight and sound
of the hooked beak and the fierce hissing. Then, be-
cause his library contained no book of exegesis equal
to the occasion, he caught a small boy, who was pass-
ing on his way to school, and sent him off post-haste
to my rooms to find out what it was all about.

K’dunk the Fat One 77

Now the three fat toads had also smelled the spring
down in a soft spot under the lawn, whither, in the
previous autumn, they had burrowed for their winter
sleep. When the Reverend James stirred the sod,
the warm sun thawed them out and brought them the
spring’s message, and they scrambled up to the surface
promptly, as full of new life as if they had not been
frozen into insensible clods for the past six months.
As for the big turtle, the smell of the fresh earth had
probably brought her up from the neighboring pond
to search out a nest for herself where she might lay
her eggs. Finding the soft warm earth of the portu-
laca bed, she had squirmed and twisted her way down
into it, the loose earth tumbling in on her and hiding
her as she went down.

When the sharp feminine eyes swept over the
flower bed they detected at once the hollow in the
middle, showing careless workmanship on the part
of somebody. “ That hole must be filled up,” promptly
declared Mrs. James; but first, woman-like, she thrust
her trowel deep into it. “Aha! a rock—careless
man,” she gave judgment, and took another jab and a
two-handed heave at the hard object. Whereupon out
came the big mud-turtle, scrambling, hissing, protest-
ing with beak and claw against being driven out of the
best nest she had ever found so early in the season.

78 A Little Brother to the Bear

That night there were curious sounds in the grass
and dead leaves—rustlings and croakings and low
husky trills, as the toads came hopping briskly by twos
and threes down to the pond. From every direction,
from garden and lawn and wood and old stone wall,
they came, croaking and trilling through the quiet twi-
light, and hopping high with delight at the first smell
of water. Down the banks they came, sliding, rolling,
tumbling end over end, — any way to get down quickly,
—landing at last with glad splashings and croakings
in the warm shallows, where they promptly took to
biting and clawing and absurd little wrestling bouts;
which is the toad’s way of settling his disputes and
taking his own mate away from the other fellows.

Two or three days they stayed in the pond, filling
the air with gurgling croaks and filling the water with
endless strings of gelatine-coated eggs—enough to
fill the whole pond banks-full of pollywogs, did not
Mother Nature step in and mercifully dispose of ninety-
nine per cent of them within a few days of hatching,
and set the rest of them to eating each other industri-
ously as they grew, till every pollywog that was left
might truthfully sing with the cannibalistic mariner:

Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold
And the mate of the Nancy brig,

The bo’sn tight and the midshipmite
And the crew of the captain’s gig.

K’dunk the Fat One 79

For every pollywog represented in his proper person
some hundred or more of his fellow-pollywogs that he
had eaten in the course of his development. But long
before that time the toads had left the pond, scattering
to the four winds whence they had come, caring not
now what became of their offspring. It was then that
K’dunk the Fat One came back to the portulaca bed.

Mrs. James found him there the next morning —a
big, warty gray toad with a broad grin and a fat belly
and an eye like a jewel —blinking sleepily after his
night’s hunting. “Mercy! there’s that awful toad
again. I hope”—with a cautious glance all round
—“TI hope he hasn’t brought the turtle with him.”
She gave him a prod and a flip with the trowel to
get him out of the flower bed, whereupon K’dunk
scrambled into his hole under an overhanging sod and
refused to come out, spite of tentative pokes of the
trowel in a hand that was altogether too tender to
hurt him. And there he stayed, waging his silent
warfare against the trowel, until I chanced along and
persuaded the good lady that she was trying to drive
away the very best friend that her flowers could
possibly have. Then K’dunk settled down in peace,
and we all took to watching him.

His first care was to make a few hiding holes here
and there in the garden. Most of these were mere

80 A Little Brother to the Bear

hollows in the soft earth, where K’dunk would crouch
with eyes shut tight whenever his enemies were near.
His color changed rapidly till it was the same general
hue as his surroundings, so that, when he lay quiet
and shut his bright eyes in one of his numerous hol-
lows, it was almost impossible to find him. But after
he had been worried two or three times by the house-
dog—a fat, wheezy little pug that always grew excited
when K’dunk began to hop about in the twilight but
that could never bark himself up to the point of touch-
‘ing the clammy thing with his nose —he dug other
holes, under the sod banks, or beside a rock, where
Grunt, the pug, could not bother him without getting
too much out of breath.

We made friends with him at first by scratching
his back with a stick, at which pleasant operation he
would swell and grunt with satisfaction. But you could
never tell when he would get enough, or at what mo-
ment he would feel his dignity touched in a tender
spot and go hopping off to the garden in high dudgeon.
Then we fed him flies and bits of tender meat, which
we would wiggle with a bit of grass to make them
seem alive. At the same time we whistled a certain
call to teach him when his supper was ready. Then,
finally, by gentle handlings and pettings he grew quite
tame, and at the sound of the whistle would scramble

K dunk the Fat One 81

out from under the door-step, where he lived by day, and
hop briskly in our direction to be fed and played with.

Though K’dunk had many interesting traits, which
we discovered with amazement as the summer pro-
gressed and we grew better acquainted, I think that
his feeding ways and tricks were the source of our
most constant delight and wonder. Just to see him
stalk a fly filled one with something of the tense excite-
ment of a deer hunt. As he sat by a stump or clod
in the fading light, some belated fly or early night-bug
would light on the ground in front of him. Instantly
the jewel eye in K’dunk’s head would begin to flash
and sparkle. He would crouch down and creep nearer,
toeing in like a duck, slower and slower, one funny
little paw brushing cautiously by the other, with all
the stealth and caution of a cat stalking a chipmunk
on the wall. Then, as he neared his game, there would
be a bright flash of the jewel; a red streak shot through
the air, so quick that your eye could not follow it, and
the fly would disappear. Whereupon K’dunk would
gulp something down, closing his eyes solemnly as he
did so, as if he were saying grace, or as if, somehow,
closing his eyes to all outward things made the morsel
taste better.

The red streak, of course, was K’dunk’s tongue,
wherein lies the secret of his hunting. It is attached

82 A Little Brother to the Bear

at the outer rim of his mouth, and folds back in his
throat. The inner end is broad and soft and sticky,
and he snaps it out and back quick as-a wink or a
lizard. Whatever luckless insect the tongue touches
is done with all bothering of our humanity. The
sticky tongue snaps him up and back into K’dunk’s
wide mouth before he has time to spread a wing or
even to think what is the matter with him.

Once I saw him stalk a grasshopper, a big lively
green fellow that, in a particularly long jump, had
come out of the protecting grass and landed on the
brown earth directly in front of where K’dunk was
catching the flies that were coming in a steady stream
to a bait that I had put out for them. Insfantly
K’dunk turned his attention from the flies to the
larger game. Just as his tongue shot out the grass-
hopper, growing suspicious, jumped for cover. The
soft tongue missed him by a hair, but struck one of
his trailing legs and knocked him aside. In an instant
K’dunk was after him again, his legs scrambling des-
perately, his eyes blazing, and his tongue shooting in
and out like a streak of flame. Just as the grasshop-
per rose ina hard jump the tongue hit him, and I saw
no more. But K’dunk’s gulp was bigger and his eyes
were closed for a longer period than usual, and there
was a loud protesting rustle in his throat as the

st

‘The soft tongue struck one of his

trailing legs”’

K dunk the Fat One 83

grasshopper’s long legs went kicking down the road
that has no turning.

A big caterpillar that I found and brought to
K’dunk, one day, afforded us all another field for
rare observation. The caterpillar was a hairy fellow,
bristling with stiff spines, and I doubted that the
tongue had enough mucilage on it to stick to him.
But K’dunk had no such doubts. His tongue flew
out and his eyes closed solemnly. At the same time
I saw the caterpillar shrink himself together and stick
his spines out stiffer than ever. Then a curious thing
came out, namely, that K’dunk’s mouth is so big and
his game is usually so small that he cannot taste his
morsel; he just swallows mechanically, as if he were
so used to catching his game that it never occurred to
him that he could miss. When he opened his eyes
and saw the caterpillar in the same place, he thought,
evidently, that it was another one which had come in
mysteriously on wings, as the flies were coming to my
bait. Again his tongue shot out, and his eyes closed
in a swallow of delight. But there in front of him, as
his eyes opened, was another caterpillar. Such per-
fect harmony of supply and demand was never known
to a toad before.

Again and again his tongue shot out, and each shot
was followed by a blink and a gulp. All the while

84 A Little Brother to the Bear

that he kept up this rapid shooting he thought he was
getting fresh caterpillars; and all the while the hairy
fellow was shrinking closer and closer together and
sticking his spines out like a porcupine. But he was
getting more mucilage on him at every shot. “ That
caterpillar is getting too stuck-up to live,” presently
said little Johnnie, who was watching the game with
me; and at the word a hairy ball shot into the wide
mouth that was yawning for him, and K’dunk went
back to his fly-catching.

It is probably this lack of taste on K’dunk’s part
that accounts for the astonishing variety of his food.
Nothing in the shape of an insect seemed to come
amiss to him. Flies, wasps, crickets, caterpillars,
doodle-bugs, and beetles of every description were all
treated alike to the same red flash of his tongue and
the blinking gulp. A half-dozen boys and girls, who
were watching the queer pet with me, were put to
their wits’ end to find something that he would not
eat. One boy, who picked huckleberries, brought in
three or four of the disagreeable little bugs, known
without a name by every country boy, that have the
skunk habit of emitting overpowering odors when dis-
turbed, thinking that he had found a poser for our
pet; but K’dunk gobbled them up as if they had been
set before him as a relish to tickle his appetite.

Kkdunk the Fat One 85

Another brought potato bugs; but these too were fish
for K’dunk’s net. Then a third boy, who had charge
of a kitchen garden, went away wagging his head and
saying that he had just picked something that no
living thing would eat. When he came back he had
a horse-radish bottle that swarmed with squash-bugs,
twenty or thirty of the vile-smelling things, which
he dumped out on the ground and stirred up with
a stick. |

Somebody ran and brought K’dunk from one of his
hiding-places and set him down on the ground in front
of the squirming mess. For a moment he seemed to
be eying his proposition with astonishment. Then he
crouched down and the swift red tongue-play began.
In four minutes, by my watch, every squash-bug that
stirred had disappeared, and K’dunk finished the
others as fast as we could wiggle them with a straw
to make them seem alive.

We gave up trying to beat him on variety after
that, and settled down to the apparently simple task
of trying to find out how many insects he could eat
before calling halt. But even here K’dunk was too
much for us; we never, singly or all together, reached
the limit of his appetite. Once we fed him ninety
rose-bugs without stopping. Another afternoon, when
three boys appeared at the same hour, we put our

86 A Little Brother to the Bear

catch together, a varied assortment of flies, bugs, and
creeping things, a hundred and sixty-four head all
told. Before dark K’dunk had eaten them all, and
went hopping off to the garden on his night’s hunting
—as if he had not already done enough to prove him-
self our friend for the entire summer.

Later we adopted a different plan and made the
game come to K’dunk on its own wings, instead of
running all over creation ourselves to catch it for him,
Near the barn was a neglected drain where the flies
were numerous enough to warn us to look after our
sanitation more zealously. Here I built a little cage
of wire netting, in which I placed a dead rat and some
scraps from the table. When the midday sun found
them and made them odorous, big flies began to pour
in, with the loud buzzing which seems to bea signal to
their fellows; for in ordinary flight the same flies are
almost noiseless. Once, however, they find a bit of
carrion fit for their eggs, they buzz about loudly every
few minutes, and other flies hear them; whereupon
their quiet flight changes to a loud buzzing. So the
news spreads —at least this seems to help the matter
—and flies pour in from every direction.

At three o’clock I brought K’dunk from his medita-
tions under the door-step and set him down in the
cage, screening him with a big rhubarb leaf so that

OO

K?’dunk the Fat One 87

the sun would not dazzle his eyes too much. Then
I took out my watch and sat down on a rock to count.

In the first ten minutes K’dunk got barely a dozen
flies. They were wary of him in the bright light, and
he was not yet waked up to the occasion. Then he
crouched down between the rat and the scraps, worked
a hollow for himself where he could turn without being
noticed, and the red tongue-play began in earnest. In'
the next half-hour he got sixty-six flies, an average of
over two a minute. In an hour his record was a hun-
dred and ten; and before I left him he had added
two dozen more to the score of our enemies. Then
the flies ceased coming, as the air grew cool, and I
carried him back to the door-step. But that night,
later than usual, he was off to the garden again to
keep up his splendid work.

When the summer glow-worms came (lightning-
bugs, the boys called them) we saw another curious
and pretty bit of hunting. One night, as we sat on
the porch in the soft twilight, I saw the first lightning-
bug glowing in the grass, and went to catch it as a
jewel for a lady’s hair. As I reached down my hand
under a bush, the glow suddenly disappeared, and I
put my fingers on K’dunk instead. He, too, had seen
the glow and had instantly adopted jacking as his
mode of hunting.

88 A Little Brother to the Bear

Later I caught a lightning-bug and put it in a tiny
bottle, and dropped it in front of K’dunk as he started
across the lawn in the late twilight. He saw the glow
through the glass and took a shot at it promptly. As
with the hairy caterpillar, he shut his eyes as he
gulped down the imaginary morsel, and when he
opened them again there was another lightning-bug
glowing in the grass just where the first had been,
So he kept the tiny bottle jumping about the lawn at
the repeated laps of his tongue, blinking and swallow-
ing betweenwhiles, until the glow-worm, made dizzy
perhaps by the topsy-turvy play of his strange cage,
folded his wings and hid his little light. Where-
upon K’dunk hopped away, thinking, no doubt, in his
own way, that while lhghtning-bugs were unusually
thick that night and furnished the prettiest kind of
hunting, they were very poor satisfaction to a hungry
stomach, — not to be compared with what he could
get by jumping up at the insects that hid on the
under side of the leaves on every plant in the garden.

It needed no words of mine by this time to con-
vince the good Mrs. James that K’dunk was her friend.
Indeed she paid a small boy ten’ cents apiece for a
half-dozen toads to turn loose about the premises to
help K’dunk in his exceilent work. And the garden
flourished as never before, thanks to the humble little

K’dunk the Fat One 89

helpers. But K’dunk’s virtues were more than utilita-
rian; he was full of unexpected things that kept us all
constantly watching with delight to see what would
happen next. As I said, he soon learned to come to
the call; but more than that, he was fond of music. |
If you whistled a little tune softly, he would stay per-
fectly still until you finished before going off on his
night’s hunting. Then, if you changed the tune, or
whistled discordantly, he would hop away as if he had
no further use for you.

Sometimes, at night, a few young people would
gather on the porch and sing together, —a_ proceed-
ing which often tolled K’dunk out from under the
door-step, and which, on one occasion, brought him
hopping hurriedly back from the garden, whither he
had gone an hour before to hunt his supper. Quiet
hymns he seemed to like, for he always kept still as
a worshiper,— which pleased the Reverend James
immensely,—but “rag-time” music he detested, if
one could judge by his actions and by the unmistak-
able way he had of turning his back upon what did
not appeal to him or touch his queer fancy.

One evening, a young girl with a very sweet natural
voice was singing by an open window on the porch.
She was singing for the old folks’ pleasure, that night,
some old simple melodies that they liked best. Just

90 A Little Brother to the Bear

within the window the piano was playing a soft
accompaniment. A stir in the grass attracted my
attention, and there was K’dunk trying in vain to climb
up the step. I called Mrs. James’ attention quietly to
the queer guest, and then lifted K’dunk gently to the
piazza. There he followed along the rail until he
was close beside the singer, where he sat perfectly
still, listening intently as long as she sang. Nor was
she conscious that night of this least one among her
hearers.

Two or three times this happened in the course of
the summer. The girl’s voice seemed to have a fas-
cination for our homely little pet, for at the first sweet
notes he would scramble out from his hiding and try
to climb the steps. When I lifted him to the porch he
would hop along till close beside the singer, where he
would sit, all quietness and appreciation, as long as she
sang. Then, one night when he had sat humble and
attentive at her feet through two songs, a tenor who
studied in New York, and who sometimes gave con-
certs, was invited to sing. He responded promptly
and atrociously with “O Hully Gee,”—which was
not the name of the thing, but only the academy
boys’ version of a once popular love-song. Had
K’dunk been a German choir-leader, he could not
have so promptly and perfectly expressed his opinion

:

.

K’dunk the Fat One 91

of the wretched twaddle. It was not the fool words,
which fortunately he could not understand, nor yet
the wretched tingle-tangle music, which was past
praying for, but rather the voice itself with its forced
unnatural quality so often affected by tenors. At the
first strident notes K’dunk grew uneasy. Then he
scrambled to the edge of the porch and fell off head-
long in his haste to get down and away from the
soul-disturbing performance.

The sudden flight almost caused a panic and an
awful breach of hospitality among the few who were
quietly watching things. To cover an irrepressible
chuckle I slipped away after K’dunk, who scrambled
clear to the pie-plant patch before he stopped hopping.
As I went I heard the gentle Mrs. James, soul of good-
ness and hospitality, coughing violently into her hand-
kerchief, as if a rude draught had struck her sensitive
throat; but it sounded to me more like a squirrel that
I once heard snickering inside of a hollow pumpkin.
However, the tenor sang on, and all was well. K’dunk
meanwhile was engaged in the better task of ridding
the garden of noxious bugs, sitting up at times, in a
funny way he had, and scratching the place where his
ear should be.

It was soon after this, when we all loved K’dunk
better than ever, that the most astonishing bit of his

92 A Little Brother to the Bear

queer life came to the surface. Unlike the higher
orders of animals, K’dunk receives no training what-
ever from his elders. The lower orders live so simple
a life that instinct 1s enough for them; and so Nature,
who can be provident at times, as well as wasteful,
omits the superfluous bother of teaching them. But
many things he did before our eyes for which instinct
could never account, and many difficulties arose for
which innate knowledge was not sufficient; and then
we saw his poor dull wits at work against the unex-
pected problems of the universe.

As the summer grew hotter and hotter K’dunk left
the door-step and made for himself a better den. All
toads do this in the scorching days—hollow out a
retreat under a sod or root or rotten stump, and
drowse there in its cool damp shade while the sun
blisters overhead. Just in front of the door-step some
broad flagstones extended across the lawn to the side-
walk. The frosts of many winters had forced them
apart, some more and some less, and a ribbon of
green grass now showed between many pairs of the
stones. Where the ribbon was widest K’dunk found
out, in some way, that the thin sod covered a hollow
underneath, and he worked at this until the sod gave
way and he tumbled into a roomy cavern under one
of the flagstones. Here it was always cool, and he

K’dunk the Fat One 93

abandoned the door-step forthwith, sleeping through
the drowsy August days in the better place that his
wits had discovered.

Now K’dunk, with good hunting in the garden and
with much artificial feeding at our hands, grew fatter
and fatter. At times when he came hopping home
in the morning, swelled out enormously with the
uncounted insects that he had eaten, he found the
space between the flagstones uncomfortably narrow.
Other toads have the same difficulty and, to avoid it,
simply scratch the entrance to their dens a little wider;
but dig and push as he would, K’dunk could not budge
the flagstones.

He scratched a longer entrance ee: his first hard
squeezing, but that did no good; the doorway was
still uncomfortably narrow, and he often reminded
me, going into his house, of a very fat and pompous
man trying to squeeze through a turnstile, tugging
and pushing and tumbling through with a grunt at
last, and turning to eye the invention indignantly.
To get out of his den was easy, for during the long
day he had digested his dinner and was thin again;
but how to get in comfortably in the morning with a
full stomach, — that was the question.

One morning I saw him come out of the garden,
and I knew instantly that he had more trouble ahead.

94 A Little Brother to the Bear

He had found some rich nests of bugs that night and
had eaten enormously; his “fair round body” dragged
along the grass as he crawled rather than hopped to
his doorway, and his one desire seemed to be to tumble
into his den drowsily and go to sleep. But alas! he
could not get in. He had reached the limit at last.

First he put his head and shoulders through, and by
pulling at the under side of the flagstones tried to
hitch and coax his way in. All in vain! His fat
body caught between the obstinate flags and only
wedged tighter and tighter. The bulging part with-
out was so much bigger than the part within that he
must have given it up at a glance, could he only have
seen himself. But he worked away with wonderful
patience till he knew it was of no use, when he
pushed himself out again and sat looking into his
inhospitable doorway, blinking and tousled and all
covered with dust and grass roots. As he sat he kept
scratching the place where his ear should be, as if he
were thinking.

In a moment or two, as if he had solved the prob-
lem, he turned around and hitched his hind legs into
the hole. He was going in backwards, but carefully,
awkwardly, as if he were not used to it. This, however,
was worse than the other, for his obstinate belly only
wedged the tighter and, with a paw down on either

K’dunk the Fat One 95

side of him, every push lifted him up instead of pull-
ing him down. He gave up quicker than before,
because his head was out now and he could see better
how he was progressing. At last he lay down, as if
he had solved the problem, and tried to squirm
through his long doorway lengthwise. This was
better. He could get either his hind legs or his head
and shoulders through; but, like the buckets in the well,
when one end was down the other end was up, and
still his fat, obstinate body refused to go through with
the rest. Still he seemed to be making progress, for
every teeter of head and legs worked his uncom-
fortable dinner into better shape. At the end he
wedged himself too tight, and there was a harder
scramble to get out than there had been to getin. By
a desperate push and kick he freed himself at last and
sat, all tousled again, blinking into his doorway, medi-
tating.

Suddenly he turned and lowered his hind legs into
the hole. He was more careful this time, afraid of
being caught. When he had dropped through as far
as he could go, he sat very still for some moments,
supporting himself with a paw on either side. His
Jaws opened slowly — and full of wonder at a curious
twitching motion he was making, I crept near on
hands and knees and looked down into his wide-open

96 A Little Brother to the Bear

mouth. There was his dinner, al] sorts of flies and
night-bugs, coming up little by little and being held in
his great mouth as in a basket, while his stomach
worked below and sent up supplies to relieve the
pressure.

Slowly he slipped down as the stones began to lose
their hard grip. A squirm, a twist, a comfortable roll
of his stomach, a sudden jounce —and the thing was
done. K’dunk was resting with a paw on either flag-
stone, his body safe below and his mouth, still wide
open above, holding its precious contents, like an old-
fashioned valise that had burst open. Then he swal-
lowed his disturbed dinner down again in big gulps,
and with a last scramble disappeared into his cool den.

That night he did not come out, but the second
night he was busy in the garden as usual. To our
deep regret he deserted both the door-step and the
den with its narrow opening under the flagstones.
It may be that in his own way he had pondered the
problem of what might have become of him had the
owl been after him when he came home that morning;
for when I found him again he was safe under the
hollow roots of an old apple-tree, where the entrance
was wide enough to tumble in quickly, however much
he had eaten. And there he stayed by day as long as
I kept tabs on him.

K’dunk the Fat One OF:

There was but one more interesting trait that I dis-
covered in the last days of the summer, and that was
his keenness in finding the best hunting-grounds. Just
behind his den in the old apple-tree was a stone wall,
under which insects of all kinds were plenty. K’dunk’s
den was on the east side, so that the sun as it set
threw the cool shade of the wall over the place and
brought our pet out earlier than was his wont. In
some way he found out that the west side of the wall
caught and held the sun’s last rays, and that flies and
all sorts of insects would light or crawl on the hot
stones to get warm in the late afternoon. He madea
tunnel for himself under the wall, just behind his den,
and would lie close beside a certain gray stone on the
west side, his gray color hiding him perfectly, picking
off the flies as they lit with the quickness and certainty
of a lizard. When bugs and insects crawled out of
their holes to sun themselves awhile on a warm stone,
K’dunk, whose eye ranged up and down over his hunt-
ing-ground, would lie still until they settled comfort-
ably, and would then creep cautiously within range
and snap them up with a flash of his tongue that the
eye could scarcely follow. In a dozen afternoons,
watching him there, I never saw him miss a single
shot, while the number of flies and insects he destroyed
must have reached up into the hundreds.

98 A Little Brother to the Bear

In the same field four or five cows were pastured,
and on pleasant days they were milked out of doors
instead of being driven into the barn. Now those
who have watched cows at milking time have probably
noted how the flies swarm on their legs, clustering
thickly above the hoofs, where the switching of a
nervous tail cannot disturb them. K’dunk had noted
it too, and often during the milking, when the cows
were quiet, he would approach a certain animal out of
the herd, creep up on one hoof after another and snap
off every fly within reach. Then he would jump for
the highest ones, hitting them almost invariably, and
tumble off on his back after a successful shot. But in
a moment he had scrambled back on a hoof again and
was waiting for the next fly to light within range.
The most curious part of it all was that he attached
himself to one cow, and would seek her out of the
herd wherever she was being milked. He never, so
far as I observed, went near any of the others; and
the cow after a time seemed to recognize the toad as
a friend, and would often stand still after being milked
as long as K’dunk remained perched on one of her
hoofs.

As the summer waned and green things disappeared
from the garden he deserted that also, going wider
and wider afield in his night’s hunting. He grew

K’dunk the Fat One 99

wilder, too, as all things do in the autumn days, till at
last no whistle, however loud, would bring him back.
Whether the owl caught him, or whether he still looks
forward to the long life that Nature gives to the toads,
I donot know; but under the edge of the portulaca
bed, as I write, is a suspicious hollow that the frosts
and snows have not quite concealed. I shall watch
that in the spring with more than common interest to
know whether K’dunk the Fat One remembers his
old friends.

A ive E- h
Ne ee MAN

BW i) y a

River, I came upon a dim old road
that had been bushed the previous winter and, having
nothing better to do, followed it to see whither it
would lead me. Other feet than mine had recently
gone on the same errand, for every soft spot.in the
earth, every moldering log and patch of swamp moss
and muddy place beside the brook, had deep footprints
and claw marks to tell me that Mooween the bear had
gone back and forth many times over the same trail.
Then I knew what I should find at the other end of
it, and was not at all surprised when it led me to the

open yard of a big lumber camp beside the river.
s Tele)

Mooween's Den IOI

There is always a fascination in such places, where
men have lived their simple lives in the heart of the
woods, shut out from all the rest of the world during
the long winter; so I began to prowl quietly about the
shanties to see what I could find. The door of the
low stable swung invitingly open, but it was a dark,
musty, il-smelling place now, though cosy enough in
winter, and only the porcupines had invaded it. I left
it after a glance and came round to the men’s shanty.

The door of this was firmly locked; but a big hole
had been torn in the roof by bears, and I crawled in
by that entrance. Mooween had been here many times
ahead of me. Every corner of the big room, the bunks
and the cupboards and even the stove, had been ran-
sacked from one end to the other; and the strong,
doggy smell of a bear was everywhere, showing how
recently he had searched the place. Here, in a cor-
ner, a large tin box had been wrenched open and flour
was scattered over the floor and deacon-seat, as if a
whirlwind had struck the place. Mooween was play-
ful evidently; or perhaps he was mad that the stuff .
for which he had taken so much trouble was too dry
to eat. The white print of one paw was drawn every-
where on the floor and walls. This was the paw of a
little bear, who had undoubtedly come late, and had to
be content with what the others had left.

102 A Little Brother to the Bear

All over the log floor some cask or vessel had been
rolled about, before the flour was spilled, and I knew
instantly that I was on the track of the first bear that
entered, the big fellow that had torn the hole in the
roof and had then nosed all over the camp without
disturbing anything until he found what he wanted.
As the thing was rolled about under his paw the
contents had been spilled liberally, and Mooween had
followed it about, lapping up what he found on the
floor and leaving not a single drop to tell the story;
but from the flies that gathered in clusters in every
sunny spot I knew that the stuff must have been
sweet — molasses probably —and that Mooween, after
he had eaten it all, had carried away the pail or jug to
lick it clean, as bears almost invariably do when they
sack a lumber camp.

Other bears had followed him into the camp and.
had found poor pickings. One had thumped open a
half barrel of pork and sampled the salty contents, and
then had nosed a pile of old moccasins inquisitively.
A dozen axes and peaveys had been pulled out of a
barrel and thrown on the floor, to see if perchance
they had hidden anything good to eat. Every pot
and pan in the big cupboard had been taken out and
given a lap or two to find out what they had cooked
last; and one bear had stood up on his hind legs and

Mooween’s Den 103

swept off the contents of a high shelf with a sweep
of his paw. Altogether the camp had been sacked
thoroughly, and it was of little use for any other bear
to search the place. The camp seemed to be waiting
silently for the lumbermen to come back in the fall
and set things to rights.

I crawled back through the hole in the roof and be-
gan to search the big yard carefully. If Mooween had
carried anything outside, it would be found not far
away; and there isa keen interest, for me at least, in
finding anything that the Wood Folk have touched or
handled. The alder stick that the beaver cut yester-
day, or the little mud pie that his paws have patted
smooth; the knot that the young coons have used as
a plaything in their den, to beguile the hours when
their mother was away; the tree against which two or
three bears have measured and scratched their height;
the log where the grouse drums; the discarded horn
of a moose; the track of an unknown beast; the old
den of a lucivee, —in all these things, and a thousand
more, there is I know not what fascination that draws
me a mile out of my course just to stand for a moment
where wild little feet have surely passed and to read
the silent records they have left behind them.

In front of the camp door was a huge pile of chips
where the lumbermen had chopped their wood during

104 A Little Brother to the Bear

the long winter. I walked up on this, wondering at
its huge size and making a great clatter as the chips
slipped from under me. Suddenly there was a terrify-
ing rumble at my feet. A bear burst out of the chip
pile, as if he had been blown up by an explosion, and
plunged away headlong into the silent woods.

This was startling enough on a quiet day. I had
been looking for something that Mooween had left, not
for Mooween himself. I stood stock still where I was
on the chip pile, staring after the bear, wondering first
where he came from, and then wondering what would
have happened had he been inside the shanty when
I came in through the roof. Then I came down and
found the queerest den that ever I have stumbled upon
in the woods.

On the north side of the mound a tunnel a couple of
feet long had been dug by the bear, and the heart of
the chip pile had been thrown out to make a little
cave, just big enough for Mooween to lie down in. I
poked my head into it, and to my astonishment found
it to be a regular ice house, with snow and ice packed
in solidly among the chips. I tried the pile in other
places and found the same conditions everywhere. A
foot or two beneath the surface the ice remained as
perfectly preserved as if it were January instead of
midsummer. Here were shade and coolness such as

Mooween's Den 105

no sun could disturb, and in a moment it came to me
how the queer thing had come about.

All winter long the lumbermen had chopped their
fire-wood on the same spot, using axes only, and mak-
ing an enormous amount of chips and rubbish. When
heavy snows fell, instead of clearing it away, they
simply cut more wood on top of it, tramping the snow
beneath into a solid mass and covering it over with
fresh chips. So the pile grew, — first a layer of chips,
then a thick blanket of snow, then more chips and
snow again, — growing bigger and bigger until in
April the lumbermen locked their shanty and went out
on the spring drive of logs.

When the spring sun melted the snow in the woods
the big pile remained, settling slowly as the days
warmed. At midday the top layer of snow would
melt and trickle down through the chips; by night it
would freeze hard, gradually changing the snow with-
in to soft ice. When all the snow in the woods was
gone, that in the chip pile remained, kept from melting
by the thick wooden blankets that covered it; and
the longest summer would hardly be sufficient to melt
it down to the bottom layer, which represented the
first fall of snow in the previous autumn.

When I found the spot it was early July. The
sun was blistering hot overhead, and the flies and

106 A Little Brother to the Bear

mosquitoes were out in myriads; but in Mooween’s
den two or three layers of ice were as yet unmelted.
The hole was as cold as a refrigerator, and not a fly
of any kind would stay there for a single second.

At the inner end of the den something glimmered
as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and I
reached in my hand and pulled the thing out. It was
a stone jug, and I knew instantly what had held the
molasses that had been spilled on the camp floor.
Mooween had probably pulled the cork and rolled the
jug about, lapping up the molasses as it came out.
When he could get no more he had taken the jug
under his arm as he climbed through the hole in the
roof, and kept it now in his cool den to lick it all over
again for any stray drops that he might have over-
looked. Perhaps also he found comfort in putting his
tongue or his nose into the nozzle to smell the sweet-
ness that he could no longer reach.

I have found one or two strange winter dens of
Mooween, and have followed his trail uncounted miles
through the snow when he had been driven out of one
hibernaculum and was seeking another in the remote
fastnesses, making an unending trail with the evident
intention of tiring out any hunter who should attempt
to follow him. I have found his bathing pools repeat-
edly, and watched him in midsummer when he sought

Mooween’s Den 107

out cool retreats ——a muddy eddy in a trout brook
under the alders, or a mossy hollow under the north side
of a great sheer ledge —to escape the flies and heat.
But none of them compare with this lumberman’s ice
house which his wits had appropriated, and which, from
many signs about the place, he was accustomed to use
daily for his nap when the sun was hottest; and none
of his many queer traits ever appealed to me quite so
strongly as the humorous cunning which prompted him
to take the jug with him into his den. It was safe
there, whether Mooween were at home or not, for no
bear will ever enter another’s den unless the owner
first show him in; and while other bears were in the
hot camp, trying to find a satisfactory bite of salt pork
and dry flour, Mooween was lying snug in his ice
house licking the molasses jug that represented his
- own particular share of the plunder.

‘ BS Cries LY “ 4

5 OSKOMENOS the king:
fisher still burrows in the earth
like his reptile ancestors; therefore
the other birds call him outcast and will have nothing
to do with him. But he cares little for that, being a
clattering, rattle-headed, self-satisfied fellow, who seems
to do nothing all day long but fish and eat. As you
follow him, however, you note with amazement that
he does some things marvelously well— better indeed
than any other of the Wood Folk. To locate a fish
accurately in still water is difficult enough, when one
thinks of light refraction; but when the fish is moving,
and the sun glares down into the pool and the wind
wrinkles its face into a thousand flashing, changing

furrows and ridges,—then the bird that can point a
108

King fisher’s Kindergarten 109

bill straight to his fish and hit him fair just behind
the gills must have more in his head than the usual
chattering gossip that one hears from him on the
trout streams.

This was the lesson that impressed itself upon me
when I first began to study Koskomenos; and the
object of this little sketch, which records those first
strong impressions, is not to give our kingfisher’s color
or markings or breeding habits — you can get all that
from the bird books—but to suggest a possible answer
to the question of how he learns so much, and how he
teaches his wisdom to the little kingfishers.

Just below my camp, one summer, was a trout pool.
Below the trout- pool was a shaded minnow basin, a
kind of storehouse for the pool above, where the trout
foraged in the early and late twilight, and where, if
you hooked a red-fin delicately on a fine leader and
dropped it in from the crotch of an overhanging tree,
you might sometimes catch a big one.

Early one morning, while I was sitting in the tree,
a kingfisher swept up the river and disappeared under
the opposite bank. He had a nest in there, so cun-
ningly hidden under an overhanging root that till then
I had not discovered it, though I had fished the pool
and seen the kingfishers clattering about many times.
They were unusually noisy when I was near, and flew

IIO A Little Brother to the Bear

up-stream over the trout pool with a long, rattling call
again and again —a ruse, no doubt, to make me think
that their nest was somewhere far above.

I watched the nest closely after that, in the intervals
when I was not fishing, and learned many things to
fill one with wonder and respect for this unknown,
clattering outcast of the wilderness rivers. He has
devotion for his mate, and feeds her most gallantly
while she is brooding. He has courage, plenty of it.
One day, under my very eyes, he drove off a mink and
almost killed the savage creature. He has well-defined
fishing regulations and enforces them rigorously, never
going beyond his limits and permitting no poaching
on his own minnow pools. He also has fishing lore
enough in his frowsy head —if one could get it out —
to make Izaak Walton’s discourse like a child’s bab-
ble. Whether the wind be south or northeast, whether
the day be dull or bright, he knows exactly where the
little fish will be found, and how to catch them.

When the young birds came, the most interesting bit
of Koskomenos’ life was manifest. One morning as I
sat watching, hidden away in the bushes, the mother
kingfisher put her head out of her hole and looked
about very anxiously. A big water-snake lay stretched
along a stranded log on the shore. She pounced upon
him instantly and drove him out of sight. Just above,

~

OT rT TT Te ae meiner

‘“He drove off a mink and almost killed
the savage creature”

King fisher’s Kindergarten 111

at the foot of the trout pool, a brood of sheldrake were
croaking and splashing about in the shallows. They
were harmless, yet the kingfisher rushed upon them,
clattering and scolding like a fishwife, and harried
them all away into a quiet bogan.

On the way back she passed over a frog, a big, sober,
sleepy fellow, waiting on a lily-pad for his sun-bath.
Chigwooltz might catch young trout, and even little
birds as they came to drink, but he would surely never
molest a brood of kingfishers; yet the mother, like an
irate housekeeper flourishing her broom at every cor-
ner of an unswept room, sounded her rattle loudly and
dropped on the sleepy frog’s head, sending him sput-
tering and scrambling away into the mud, as if Hawa-
hak the hawk were after him. Then with another look
all round’ to see that the stream was clear, and with a
warning rattle to any Wood Folk that she might have
overlooked, she darted into her nest, wiggling her tail
like a satisfied duck as she disappeared.

After a moment a wild-eyed young kingfisher put
his head out of the hole for his first look at the big
world. A push from behind cut short his contempla-
tion, and without any fuss whatever he sailed down to
a dead branch on the other side of the stream. Another
and another followed in the same way, as if each one
had been told just what to do and where to go, till

112 A Little Brother to the Bear

the whole family were sitting a-row, with the rippling
stream below them and the deep blue heavens and the
rustling world of woods above.

That was their first lesson, and their reward was
near. The male bird had been fishing since daylight;
now he began to bring minnows from an eddy where
he had stored them, and to feed the hungry family and
assure them, in his own way, that this big world, so
different from the hole in the bank, was-a good place
to live in, and furnished no end of good things to eat.

The next lesson was more interesting, the lesson of
catching fish. The school was a quiet, shallow pool
with a muddy bottom, against which the fish showed
clearly, and with a convenient stub leaning over it
from which to swoop. The old birds had caught a
score of minnows, killed them, and dropped them here
and there under the stub. Then they brought the
young birds, showed them their game, and told them
by repeated examples to dive and get it. The little
fellows were hungry and took to the sport keenly; but
one was timid, and only after the mother had twice dived
and brought up a fish — which she showed to the timid
one and then dropped back in a most tantalizing way
—did he muster up resolution to take the plunge.

A few mornings later, as I prowled along the shore,
I came upon a little pool quite shut off from the main

|
.

King fisher’s Kindergarten rn

stream, in which a dozen or more frightened minnows
were darting about, as if in strange quarters. As I
stood watching them and wondering how they got
over the dry bar that separated the pool from the river,
a kingfisher came sweeping up-stream with a fish in
his bill, Seeing me, he whirled silently and disap-
peared round the point below.

The thought of the curious little wild kindergarten
occurred to me suddenly as I turned to the minnows
again, and I waded across the river. and hid in the
bushes. After an hours wait Koskomenos came
stealing back, looked carefully over the pool and the
river, and swept down-stream with a rattling call.
Presently he came back again with his mate and the
whole family; and the little ones, after seeing their
parents swoop, and tasting the fish they caught,
began to swoop for themselves.

_ The first plunges were usually in vain, and when a
minnow was caught it was undoubtedly one of the
wounded fish that Koskomenos had placed there in
the lively swarm to encourage his little ones. After a
try or two, however, they seemed to get the knack of
the thing and would drop like a plummet, bill first, or
shoot down on a sharp incline and hit their fish
squarely as it darted away into deeper water. The
river was wild and difficult, suitable only for expert

114 A Little Brother to the Bear

fishermen. The quietest pools had no fish, and where
minnows were found the water or the banks were
against the little kingfishers, who had not yet learned
to hover and take their fish from the wing. So Kos-
komenos had found a suitable pool and stocked it him-
self to make his task of teaching more easy for his
mate and more profitable for his little ones. The
most interesting point in his method was that, in this
case, he had brought the minnows alive to his kinder-
garten, instead of killing or wounding them, as in the

first lesson. He knew that the fish could not get out.

of the pool, and that his little ones could take their
own time in catching them.

When I saw the family again, weeks afterwards,
their lessons were well learned; they needed no
wounded or captive fish to satisfy their hunger. They
were full of the joy of living, and showed me, one day,
a curlous game, — the only play that I have ever seen
among the kingfishers.

There were three of them, when I first found them,
perched on projecting stubs over the dancing riffles,
which swarmed with chub and “ minnies” and samlets
and lively young red-fins. Suddenly, as if at the com-
mand go/ they all dropped, bill first, into the river.
In a moment they were out again and rushed back
to their respective stubs, where they threw their heads

:
.

King fisher’s Kindergarten 115

back and wriggled their minnows down their throats
with a haste to choke them all. That done, they
began to dance about on their stubs, clattering and
chuckling immoderately.

It was all blind to me at first, till the game was
repeated two or three times, always starting at the
same instant with a plunge into the riffles and a rush
.back to goal. Then their object was as clear as the
stream below them. With plenty to eat and never a
worry in the world, they were playing a game to see
which could first get back to his perch and swallow
his fish. Sometimes one or two of them failed to get
a fish and glided back dejectedly; sometimes all three
were so.close together that it took a deal of jab-
ber to straighten the matter out; and they always
ended in the same way, by beginning all over again.

Koskomenos is a solitary fellow, with few pleasures,
and fewer companions to share them with him. This
is undoubtedly the result of his peculiar fishing regu-
lations, which give to each kingfisher a certain piece
of lake or stream for his own. Only the young of the
same family go fishing together; and so I have no
doubt that these were the same birds whose early
‘training I had watched, and who were now enjoying
themselves in their own way, as all the other Wood
Folk do, in the fat, careless, happy autumn days.

VE
Le
1.

EKOMPF the wildcat is one of the savage

beasts that have not yet vanished from the
haunts of men. Sometimes, as you clamber up the
wooded hillside above the farm, you will come sud-
denly upon a fierce-looking, catlike creature stretched
out on a rock sunning himself. At sight of you he
leaps up with a snarl, and you have a swift instant in
which to take his measure. He is twice as big as a
house-cat, with round head and big expressionless
eyes that glare straight into yours with a hard, green-
ish glitter. His reddish-brown sides are spotted here
and there, and the white fur of his belly is blotched
with black — the better to hide himself amid the lights
and shadows. A cat, sure enough, but unlike anything

of the kind you have ever seen before.
116

Pekompf’s Cunning . ay

As you look and wonder, there is a faint sound that
you will do well to heed. The muscles of his long
thick legs are working nervously, and under the mo-
tion is a warning purr, not the soft rumble in a
contented tabby’s throat, but the cut and rip of ugly
big claws as they are unsheathed viciously upon the
dry leaves. His stub tail is twitching — you had not
noticed it before, but now it whips back and forth
angrily, as if to call attention to the fact that Nature
had not altogether forgotten that end of Pekompf.
Whip, whip, it 2s a tal—yaaaah/ And you jump
as the fierce creature screeches in your face.

If it is your first wildcat, you will hardly know what
to do, —to stand perfectly quiet is always best, unless
you have a stick or gun in your hand,—and if you
have met Pekompf many times before, you are quite
as uncertain what he will do this time. Most wild
creatures, however fierce, prefer to mind their own
business and will respect the same sentiment in you.
But when you stumble upon a wildcat you are never
sure of his next move. That is because he is a slink-
ing, treacherous creature, and never quite knows how
best to meet you. He suspects you unreasonably,
because he knows you suspect him with reason.
Generally he slinks away, or leaps suddenly for cover,
according to the method of your approach. But,

118 A Little Brother to the Bear

though smaller, he is naturally more savage than either
the Canada lynx or the panther, and sometimes he
crouches and snarls in your face, or even jumps for
your chest at the first movement.

Once, to my knowledge, he fell like a fury upon
the shoulders of a man who was hurrying homeward
through the twilight, and who happened to stop una-
wares under the tree where Pekompf was_ watch-
ing the runways. The man had no idea that a wildcat
was near, and he probably never would have known
had he gone steadily on his way. As he told me
afterwards, he felt a sudden alarm and stopped to
listen. The moment he did so the savage creature
above him thought himself discovered, and leaped to
carry the war into Africa. There was a pounce, a
screech, a ripping of cloth, a wild yell for help; then
the answering shout and rush of two woodsmen with
their axes. And that night Pekompf’s skin was
nailed to the barn-door to dry in the sun before being
tanned and made up into a muff for the woodsman’s
little. girl to warm her fingers withal in the bitter
winter weather.

Where civilization has driven most of his fellows
away, Pekompf is a shy, silent creature; but where
the farms are scattered and the hillsides wild and

wooded, he is bolder and more noisy than in the

Pekompf’s Cunning II 9

unpeopled wilderness. From the door of the charcoal-
burner’s hut, in the Connecticut hills, you may still
hear him screeching and fighting with his fellows
as the twilight falls, and the yowling uproar causes a
colder chill in your back than anything you will ever
hear in the wilderness. As you follow the trout
stream, from which the charcoal man daily fills his
kettle, you may find Pekompf stretched on a fallen
log under the alders, glaring intently into the trout
pool, waiting, waiting —for what?

It will take many seasons of watching to answer this
natural question, which every one who is a follower
of the wild things has asked himself a score of times.
All the cats have but one form of patience, the patience
of quiet waiting. Except when hunger-driven, their
way of hunting is to watch beside the game paths or
crouch upon a big limb above the place where their
game comes down to drink. Sometimes they vary
their programme by prowling blindly through the
woods, singly or in pairs, trusting to luck to blunder
upon their game; for they are wretched hunters.
They rarely follow a trail, not simply because their
noses are not keen —for in the snow, with a trail as
plain as a deer path, they break away from it with
_ reckless impatience, only to scare the game into a
headlong dash for safety. Then they will crouch

120 A Little Brother to the Bear

under a dwarf spruce and stare at the trail with round
unblinking eyes, waiting for the frightened creatures
to come back, or for other creatures to come by in
the same footprints. Even in teaching her young a
mother wildcat is full of snarling whims and tempers;
but now let a turkey gobble far away in the woods, let
Musquash dive into his den where she can see it, let
but a woodmouse whisk out of sight into his hidden
doorway, — and instantly patience returns to Pekompf.
All the snarling ill-temper vanishes. She crouches and
waits, and forgets all else. She may have just fed full
on what she likes best, and so have no desire for food
and no expectation of catching more; but she must
still watch, as if to reassure herself that her eyes are
not deceived, and that Tookhees is really there, under
the mossy stone, where she saw the scurry of his little
legs and heard his frightened squeak as he disappeared.

But why should a cat watch at a trout pool, out of
which nothing ever comes to reward his patience?
That was a puzzling question for many years. I had
seen Pekompf many times stretched on a log, or lying
close to a great rock, over the water, so intent on his
watching that he heard not my cautious approach.
Twice from’ my canoe I had seen Upweekis the lynx
on the shore of a wilderness lake, crouched among the
weather-worn roots of a stranded pine, his great paws

Pekompf’s Cunning 121

almost touching the water, his eyes fixed with unblink-
ing stare on the deep pool below. And once, when
trout fishing on a wild river just opposite a great jam
of logs and driftwood, I had stopped casting suddenly
with an uncanny feeling of being watched by unseen
eyes at my solitary sport.

It is always well to heed such a warning in the
woods. I looked up and down quickly; but the river
held no life above its hurrying flood. I searched the
banks carefully and peered suspiciously into the woods
behind me; but save for the dodging of a winter wren,
who seems always to be looking for something that he
has lost and that he does not want you to know about,
the shores were wild and still as if just created. I
whipped out my flies again. What was that, just
beyond the little wavelet where my Silver Doctor had
fallen? Something moved, curled, flipped and twisted
nervously. It was a tail, the tip end that cannot be
quiet. And there —an irrepressible chill trickled over
me as I made out the outlines of a great gray beast
stretched on a fallen log, and caught the gleam of his
wild eyes fixed steadily upon me. Even as I saw the
thing it vanished like a shadow of the woods. But what
_ was the panther watching there before he watched me?

The answer came unexpectedly. It was in the
Pemigewasset valley, in midsummer. At daybreak

ae A Little Brother to the Bear

I had come softly down the wood road to the trout
pool and stopped to watch a mink dodging in and
out along the shore. When:he passed out of sight
under some logs I waited quietly for other Wood Folk
to show themselves. A slight movement on the end
ofa log —and there was Pekompf, so still that the
eye could hardly find him, stretching a paw down
cautiously and flipping it back with a peculiar inward
sweep. Again he did it, and I saw the long curved
claws, keen as fish-hooks, stretched wide out of their
sheaths. He was fishing, spearing his prey with the
patience of an Indian; and even as I made the dis-
covery there was a flash of silver following the quick
jerk of his paw, and Pekompf leaped to the shore and
crouched over the fish that he had thrown out of the
water.

So Pekompf watches the pools as he watches a
squirrel’s hole, because he has seen game there, and
because he likes fish above everything else that the
woods can furnish. But how often must he watch
the big trout before he catches one? Sometimes, in
the twilight, the largest fish will move out of the
pools and nose along the shore for food, their back
fins showing out of the shallow water as they glide
along. It may be that Pekompf sometimes catches
them at this time, and so when he sees the gleam of a

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Pekompf’s Cunning 123

fish in the depths he crouches where he is for a while,
following the irresistible impulse of all cats at the
sight of game. Herein they differ from all other sav-
age beasts, which, when not hungry, pay no attention
whatever to smaller animals.

It may be, also, that Pekompf’s cunning is deeper
than this: Old Noel, a Micmac hunter, tells me that
both wildcat and lynx, whose cunning is generally the
cunning of stupidity, have discovered a remarkable
way of catching fish. They will he with. their heads
close to the water, their paws curved for a quick
grab, their eyes half shut to deceive the fish, and
their whiskers just touching and playing with the sur-
face. Their general color blends with that of their
surroundings and hides them perfectly. The trout,
noticing the slight crinkling of the water where the
long whiskers touch it, but not separating the crouch-
ing animal from the log or rock on which he rests, rise
to the surface, as is their wont when feeding, and are
snapped out by a lightning sweep of the paws.

Whether this be so or not, I am not sure. The
raccoon undoubtedly catches crabs and little fish in
this way; and I have sometimes surprised cats — both
wildcats and Canada lynxes, as well as domestic tab-
bies — with their heads down close to the water, so
still that they seemed part of the log or rock on which

124 A Little Brother to the Bear

they crouched. Once I tried for five minutes to make
a guide see a big lynx that was lying on a root in
plain sight within thirty yards of our canoe, while the
guide assured me in a whisper that he could see per-
fectly and that it was only a stump. Then, hearing
us, the lynx rose, stared, and leaped for the brush.

Such hiding would easily deceive even a trout, for
I have often taken my position at the edge of a jam
and, after lying perfectly still for ten minutes, have
seen the wary fish rise from under the logs to investi-
gate a straw or twig that I held in my fingers, and
with which I touched the water here and there, like
an insect at play.

So Old Noel is probably right when he says that
Pekompf fishes with his whiskers, for the habits of
both fish and cats seem to carry out his observations.

But deeper than his cunning is Pekompf’s inborn
suspicion and his insane fury at being opposed or cor-
nered, ‘The trappers catch him, as they catch his big
cousin the lucivee, by setting a snare in the rabbit
paths that he nightly follows. Opposite the noose
and attached to the other end of the cord is a pole,
which jumps after the cat as he starts forward with —
the loop about his neck. Were it a fox, now, he
would back out of the snare, or lie still and cut the
cord with his teeth and so escape. But, like all cats

Pekompf’s Cunning 125

when trapped, Pekompf flies into a blind fury. He
screeches at the unoffending stick, claws it, battles
with it, and literally chokes himself in his rage. Or,
if he be an old cat and his cunning a bit deeper, he
will go off cautiously and climb the biggest tree he
can find, with the uncomfortable thing that he is tied
to dangling and clattering behind him. When near
the top he will leave the stick hanging on one side
of a limb while he cunningly climbs down the other,
thinking thus to fool his dumb enemy and leave him
behind. One of two things always happens. Either
the stick catches in the crotch and Pekompf hangs
himself on his own gibbet, or else it comes over with
a sudden jerk and falls to the ground, pulling Pekompf
with it and generally killing him in the fall.

It is a cruel, brutal kind of device at best, and fortu-
nately for the cat tribe it has almost vanished from the
northern woods, except in the far Northwest, where
the half-breeds still use it for lynx successfully. But as
a study of the way in which trappers seize upon some
peculiarity of an animal and use it for his destruction,
it has no equal.

That Pekompf’s cunning is of the cat kind, suspi-
cious without being crafty or intelligent, like that of
the fox or wolf, is curiously shown by a habit which
both lynx and wildcat have in common, namely, that

126 A Little Brother to the Bear

of carrying anything they steal to the top of some lofty
evergreen to devour it. When they catch a rabbit or
fish fairly themselves, they generally eat it on the spot;
but when they steal the same animal from snare or
cache, or from some smaller hunter, the cat suspicion
returns —together with some dim sense of wrong-
doing, which all animals feel more or less —and they
make off with the booty and eat it greedily where they
think no one will ever find them.

Once, when watching for days under a fish-hawk’s
nest to see the animals that came in shyly to eat the
scraps that the little fish-hawks cast out when their
hunger was satisfied, this cat habit was strikingly
manifest. Other animals would come in and quietly
eat what they found and slip away again; but the cats
would seize on a morsel with flashing eyes, as if defying
all law and order, and would either growl horribly as
they ate or else would slink away guiltily and, as I
found out by following, would climb the biggest tree
at hand and eat the morsel in the highest crotch that
gave a foothold. And once, on the Maine coast in
November, I saw a fierce battle in the tree-tops,
where a wildcat crouched, snarling like twenty fiends,
while a big eagle whirled and swooped over him,
trying to take away the game that Pekompf had
stolen.

Pekompf’s Cunning 127

By far the most curious bit of Pekompf’s cunning
came under my eyes, one summer, a few years ago.
Until recently I had supposed it to be a unique dis-
covery; but last summer a friend, who goes to New-
foundland every year for the salmon fishing, had a
similar experience with a Canada lynx, which empha-
sizes the tendency of all cats to seek the tree-tops
with anything that they have stolen; though curiously
enough I have never found any trace of it with game
that they had caught honestly themselves. It was in
Nova Scotia, where I was trout fishing for a little sea-
son, and where I had no idea of meeting Pekompf, for
the winters are severe there and the wildcat is supposed
to leave such places to his more powerful and longer-
legged cousin, the lynx, whose feet are bigger than his
and better padded for walking on the snow. Even in
the southern Berkshires you may follow Pekompt’s
trail and see where he makes heavy weather of it, floun-
dering belly-deep, like a domestic tabby, through the
soft drifts in his hungry search for grouse and rabbits,
and lying down in despair at last to’ wait till the snow
settles. But to my surprise Pekompf was there, bigger,
fiercer, and more cunning than I had ever seen him;
though I did not discover this till after a long search.

I had fished from dawn till almost six o’clock
one morning, and had taken two good trout, which

128 A Little Brother to the Bear

were all that the stream promised to yield for the day.
Then I thought of a little pond in the woods over the
mountain, which looked trouty when I had discovered
it, and which, so far as I knew, had never been fished
with a fly. Led more by the fun of exploring than by
the expectation of fish, I started to try the new waters.

The climb through the woods promised to be a hard
one, so I left everything behind except rod, reel, and
fly-book. My coat was hung on the nearest bush;
the landing-net lay in the shade across a rock, the end
of the handle wedged under a root, and I dropped my
two trout into that and covered them from the sun
with ferns and moss. Then I started off through the
woods for the little pond.

When I came back empty-handed, a few hours later,
trout and landing-net were gone. The first thought
naturally was that some one had stolen them, and I
looked for the thief’s tracks; but, save my own, there
was not a footprint anywhere beside the stream up or
down. Then I looked beside the rock more carefully
and found bits of moss and fish-scales, and the pugs of
some animal, too faint in the gravel to make out what
the beast was that made them. I followed the faint
traces for a hundred yards or more into the woods till
they led me to a great spruce tree, under which every
sign disappeared utterly, as if the creature had suddenly

’
SE ee a a ee

Pekompf’s Cunning 129

flown away net and all, and I gave up the trail with-
out any idea of what had made it.

For two weeks that theft bothered me. It was not
so much the loss of my two trout and net, but rather
the loss of my woodcraft on the trail that had no end,
which kept me restless. The net was a large one,
altogether too large and heavy for trout fishing. At
the last moment before starting on my trip I found
that my trout net was rotten and useless, and so had
taken the only thing at hand, a specially made forty-
inch net which I had last used on a scientific expedition
for collecting specimens from the lakes of northern
New Brunswick. The handle was long, and the bow,
as I had more than once tested, was powerful enough
to use instead of a gaff for taking a twenty-five pound
salmon out of his pool after he had been played to a
standstill; and how any creature could drag it off
through the woods without leaving a plain trail for my
eyes to follow puzzled me, and excited a most lively
curiosity to know who he was and why he had not
eaten the fish where he found them. Was it lynx or
stray wolf, or had the terrible Injun Devil that is still
spoken of with awe at the winter firesides returned to
his native woods? For a week I puzzled over the
question; then I went back to the spot and tried in
vain to follow the faint marks in the moss, After

i230. A Little Brother to the Bear

that whenever I wandered near the spot I tried the
trail again, or circled wider and wider through the
woods, hoping to find the net or some positive sign of
the beast that had stolen it.

One day in the woods it occurred to me suddenly
that, while I had followed the trail three or four times,
I had never thought to examine the tree beneath
which it ended. At the thought I went to the big
spruce and there, sure enough, were flecks of bright
brown here and there where the rough outer shell had
been chipped off. And there also, glimmering white,
was a bit of dried slime where a fish had rested for an
instant against the bark. The beast, whatever he was,
had climbed the tree with his booty; and the discovery
was no sooner made than I was shinning up eagerly
after him.

Near the scraggy top I found my net, its long
handle wedged firmly in between two branches, its bow
caught on a projecting stub, its bag hanging down
over empty space. In the net was a big wildcat, his
round head driven through a hole which he had bitten
in the bottom, the tough meshes drawn taut as fiddle-
strings about his throat. All four legs had clawed or
pushed their way through the mesh, till every kick and
struggle served only to bind and choke him more
effectually.

Pekompf’s Cunning “Ee

From little marks and almost imperceptible signs I
made out at last the outline of the story. Pekompf
had found the fish and tried to steal them; but his
suspicions were roused by the queer net and the clat-
tering handle. With true lynx cunning, which is
always more than half stupidity, he had carried it off
and started to climb the biggest tree he could find.
Near the top the handle had wedged among the
branches, and while he tried to dislodge it net and fish
had swung clear of the trunk. In the bark below the
handle I found where he had clung to the tree boll
and tried to reach the swinging trout with his paw;
and on a branch above the bow were marks which
showed where he had looked down longingly at the
fish at the bottom of the net, just below his hungry
nose. From this branch he had either fallen or, more
likely, in a fit of blind rage had leaped into the net,
which closed around him and held him more effectu-
ally than bars of iron. When I came under the tree
for the first time, following his trail, he was probably
crouched on a limb over my head watching me steadily;
and when I came back the second time he was dead.

That was all that one could be sure about. But here
and there, in a torn mesh, or a tuft of fur, or the rip of
a claw against a swaying twig, were the marks of a strug-
gle whose savage intensity one could only imagine.

seen a sick cat eat grass,
or an uneasy dog seek out
some weed and devour it greedily to make his com-
plaining stomach feel better. Some few may have
read John Wesley’s directions on the art of keeping
well—which have not, however, found their way into
his book of discipline for the soul—and have noted
with surprised interest his claim that many medicines
in use among the common people and the physicians
of his time were discovered by watching the animals
that sought out these things to heal their diseases.
“Tf they heal animals they will also heal men” is
his invincible argument. Others may have dipped
deep into Indian history and folk-lore, and learned

that many of the herbs used by the American tribes,
132

Animal Surgery 2

and especially the cures for rheumatism, dysentery,
fever, and snake bites, were learned direct from the
animals, by noting the rheumatic old bear grub for
fern roots or bathe in the hot mud of a sulphur
spring, and by watching with eager eyes what plants
the wild creatures ate when bitten by rattlers or
wasted by thefever. Still others have been fascinated
with the first crude medical knowledge of the Greeks,
which came to them from the East undoubtedly, and
have read that the guarded mysteries of the Asclepi-
ades, the healing cult that followed A‘sculapius, had
among them many simple remedies that had first
proved their efficacy among animals in a natural
state; and that Hippocrates, the greatest physician of
antiquity, whose fame under the name of Bokrat the
Wise went down through Arabia and into the farthest
deserts, owes many of his medical aphorisms to what
he himself, or his forbears, must have seen out of doors
among the wild creatures. And all these seers and
readers have perhaps wondered how much the animals
knew, and especially how they came to know it.

To illustrate the matter simply and in our own day
and generation: A deer that has been chased all day
long by dogs, and that has escaped at last by swim-
ming an icy river and fallen exhausted on the farther
shore, will lie down to sleep in the snow. That would

134 A Little Brother to the Bear

mean swift death for any human being. Half the
night the deer will move about at short intervals, in-
stead of sleeping heavily, and in the morning he is as
good as ever and ready for another run. The same
deer shut up in a warm barn to sleep overnight, as has
been more than once tested with park animals, will be
found dead in the morning.

Here is a natural law of healing suggested, which, if
noted among the Greeks and Indians, would have been
adopted instantly as a method of dealing with extreme
cold and exhaustion, or with poisoning resulting in
paralysis of the muscles. Certainly the method, if
somewhat crude, might still have wrought enough
cures to be looked upon with veneration by a people
who unfortunately had no knowledge of chemical
drugs, or Scotch whisky, or sugar pellets with an
ethereal suggestion of intangible triturations some-
where in the midst of them.

That the animals do practice at times a rude kind
of medicine and surgery upon themselves is undeni-
able. The only question about it is, How do they
know? To say it is a matter of instinct is but beg-
ging the question. It is also three-fourths foolishness,
for many of the things that animals do are beyond the
farthest scope of instinct. The case of the deer that
moved about and so saved his life, instead of sleeping

‘Escaped at last by swimming
an icy river’’

Animal Surgery <2 535

on heavily to his death, may be partly a case of in-
stinct. Personally it seems to me more a matter of
experience; for a fawn under the same circumstances,
unless his mother were near to lick him with her
tongue and keep him moving, would undoubtedly lie
down and die. More than that, it seems to be largely
a matter of obedience to the strongest impulse of the
moment, to which all animals are accustomed or
trained from their birthday. And that is not quite the
same thing as instinct, unless one is disposed to go
to the extreme of Berkeley’s philosophy and make
instinct a kind of spirit-personality that watches over
animals all the time. Often the knowledge of healing,
or of primitive surgery, seems to be the discovery or
possession of a few rare individual animals, instead of
being spread widecast among the species, as instincts
are. This knowledge, or what-you-may-call-it, is some-
times shared, and so hints at a kind of communication
among animals, of whose method we catch only fleet-
ing glimpses and suggestions — but that will be the
subject of another article. The object of this is, not to
answer the questions of how or whence, but simply to
suggest one or two things I have seen in the woods as
the basis for further and more detailed observations.
The most elemental kind of surgery is that which
amputates a leg when it is broken, not always or often,

136 A Little Brother to the Bear

but only when the wound festers from decay or fly-bite
and so endangers the whole body. Probably the best
illustration of this is found in the coon, who has a
score of traits that place him very high among intelli-
gent animals. When a coon’s foot is shattered by a
bullet he will cut it off promptly and wash the stump
in running water, partly to reduce the inflammation
and partly, no doubt, to make it perfectly clean. As
it heals he uses his tongue on the wound freely, as a
dog does, to cleanse it perhaps, and by the soft mas-
sage of his tongue to reduce the swelling and allay the
pain.

So far this may or may not be pure instinct. For I
do not know, and who will tell me, whether a child
puts his wounded hand to his mouth and sucks and
cleanses the hurt by pure instinct, or because he has
seen others do it, or because he has had his hurts kissed
away in childhood, and so imitates the action uncon-
sciously when his mother is not near.

Most mother animals tongue their little ones freely.
Now is that a caress, or is it some hygienic measure
begun at birth, when she devours all traces of the
birth-envelopes and licks the little ones clean lest the
nose of some hungry prowler bring him near to de-

stroy the family? Certainly the young are conscious ~

of the soft tongue that rubs them fondly, and so when

i

Animal Surgery 137

they lick their own wounds it may be only a memory
and an imitation, —two factors, by the way, which lie
at the bottom of all elemental education. That expla-
nation, of course, leaves the amputated leg out of the
question ; and the surgery does not stop here.

When a boy, and still barbarian enough to delight
in trapping, partly from a love of the chase that was
born in me, and partly to put money into a boy’s
empty pocket, I once caught a muskrat in a steel trap
that slid off into deep water at the first pull and so
drowned the creature mercifully. This was due to the
careful instructions of Natty Dingle, at whose feet I
sat to learn woodcraft, and who used the method to
save all his pelts; for often an animal, when caught in
a trap, will snap the bone by a twist of his body and
then cut the leg off with his teeth, and so escape,
leaving his foot in the trap’s jaws. This is common
enough among fur-bearing animals to excite no com-
ment; and it is sad now to remember that sometimes
I would find animals drowned in my traps, that had
previously suffered at the hands of other trappers.

I remember especially one big musquash that I was
going to shoot near one of my traps, when I stopped
short at noticing some queer thing about him. The
trap was set in shallow water where a path made by
muskrats came up out of the river into the grass.

138 A Little Brother to the Bear

Just over the trap was a turnip on a pointed stick to
draw the creature’s attention and give him something
to anticipate until he should put his foot on the
deadly pan beneath. But the old musquash avoided
the path, as if he had suffered in such places before.
Instead of following the ways of his ancestors he came
out at another spot, behind the trap, and I saw with
horrible regret that he had cut off both his fore legs,
probably at different times, when he had been twice
caught in man’s abominable inventions. When he
came up out of the stream he rose on his hind legs
and waddled through the grass like a bear or a
monkey, for he had no fore feet to rest upon. He
climbed a tussock beside the bait with immense
caution, pulled in the turnip with his two poor stumps
of forearms, ate it where he was, and slipped back into
the stream again; while the boy watched with a new
wonder in the twilight, and forgot all about the gun
as he tended his traps.

It does not belong with my story, but that night the
traps came in, and never went out again; and I can
never pass a trap now anywhere without poking a stick
into it to save some poor innocent leg.

All this is digression; and I have almost forgotten —
my surgery and the particular muskrat I was talking —
about. He, too, had been caught in some other

Anmal Surgery 139

fellow’s trap and had bitten his leg off only a few
days before. The wound was not yet healed, and the
amazing thing about it was that he had covered it
with some kind of sticky vegetable gum, probably
from some pine-tree that had been split or barked
close to the ground where Musquash could reach it
easily. He had smeared it thickly all over the wound
and well up the leg above it, so that all dirt and even
all air and water were excluded perfectly.

An old Indian, who lives and hunts on Vancouver
Island, told me recently that he has several times
caught beaver that had previously cut their legs off to
escape from traps, and that two of them had covered
the wounds thickly with gum, as the muskrat had
done. Last spring the same Indian caught a bear in
a deadfall. On the animal’s side was a long rip from
some other bear’s claw, and the wound had been
smeared thickly with soft spruce resin. This last
experience corresponds closely with one of my own.
I shot a big bear, years ago, in northern New Bruns-
wick, that had received a gunshot wound, which had
raked him badly and then penetrated the leg. He
had plugged the wound carefully with clay, evidently
to stop the bleeding, and then had covered the broken
skin with sticky mud from the river’s brink, to keep
the flies away from the wound and give it a chance to

140 A Little Brother to the Bear -

heal undisturbed. It is noteworthy here that the bear
uses either gum or clay indifferently, while the beaver
and muskrat seem to know enough to avoid the clay,
which would be quickly washed off in the water.

Here are a few incidents, out of a score or more
that I have seen, or heard from reliable hunters, that
indicate something more than native instinct among
animals. When I turn to the birds the incidents are
fewer but more remarkable ; for the birds, being lower
in the scale of life, are more subject to instinct than
are the animals, and so are less easily taught by their
mothers, and are slower to change their natural habits
to meet changing conditions.

This is, of course, a very general statement and is
subject to endless exceptions. The finches that, when
transported to Australia from England, changed the
style of their nests radically and now build in a fash-
ion entirely different from that of their parents; the
little goldfinch of New England that will build a false
bottom to her nest to cover up the egg of a cow-bird
that has been left to hatch among her own; the
grouse that, near the dwellings of men, are so much
wilder and keener than their brethren of the wilder-
ness; the swallows that adopt the chimneys and
barns of civilization instead of the hollow trees and
clay banks of their native woods, —all these and a

Animal Surgery 141

score of others show how readily instinct is modified
among the birds, and how the young are taught a
wisdom that their forefathers never knew. Neverthe-
less it is true, I think, that instincts are generally
sharper with them than with animals, and the following
cases suggest all the more strongly that we must look
beyond instinct to training and individual discovery
to account for many things among the feathered folk.

The most wonderful bit of bird surgery that has ever
come to my attention is that of the woodcock that
set his broken leg in a clay cast, as related in a pre-
vious chapter; but there is one other almost as re-
markable that opens up a question that is even harder
to answer. One day, in the early spring, I saw two
eider-ducks swimming about the Hummock Pond on
the island of Nantucket. The keen-eyed critic will
interfere here and say I was mistaken; for eiders are
salt-water ducks that haunt only the open sea, and are
supposed never to enter fresh water, not even to breed.
That is what I also supposed until I saw these two;
so I sat down to watch awhile and find out, if possible,
what had caused them to change their habits. At
this time of year the birds are almost invariably found
in pairs, and sometimes a flock a hundred yards long
will pass you, flying close to the water and sweeping
around the point where you are watching, first a

142 A Little Brother to the Bear

pretty brown female and then a gorgeous black-and-
white drake just behind her, alternating with perfect
regularity, female and male, throughout the whole
length of the long line. The two birds before me,
however, were both females; and that was another
reason for watching them instead of the hundreds of
other ducks, coots and sheldrakes and broadbills that
were scattered all over the big pond.

The first thing noticed was that the birds were act-
ing queerly, dipping their heads under water and
keeping them there for a full minute or more at a
time. That was also curious, for the water under
them was too deep for feeding, and the eiders prefer to
wait till the tide falls and then -cather the exposed
shellfish from the rocks, rather than to dive after them,
like a coot. Darkness came on speedily to hide the —
birds, which were still dipping their heads as if be-
witched, and I went away no wiser for my watching,

A few weeks later there was another eider, a big
drake, in the same pond, behaving in the same queer
way. Thinking perhaps that this was a wounded bird —
that had gone crazy from a shot in the head, as ducks —
often do, I pushed out after him in an old tub of a
boat; but he took wing at my approach, like any
other duck, and after a vigorous flight lit farther down
the pond and plunged his head under water again.

Animal Surgery 143

Thoroughly curious now, I went on a still hunt after
the stranger, and after much difficulty succeeded in
shooting him from the end of a bushy point. The
only unusual thing about him was that a large mussel,
such as grow on the rocks in salt water, had closed
his shells firmly on the bird’s tongue in such a way
that he could neither be crushed by the bird’s bill nor
scratched off by the bird’s foot. I pulled the mussel
off, put it in my pocket, and went home more mysti-
fied than before.

That night I hunted up an old fisherman, who had
a big store of information in his head about all kinds
of wild things, and asked him if he had ever seena
shoal-duck in fresh water. “Once or twice,” he said:
“they kept dipping their heads under water, kinder
crazy like.” But he had no explanation to offer until I
showed him the mussel that I had found on the duck’s
tongue. Then his face lightened. “ Mussels of that
kind won't live in fresh water,” he declared at a glance;
and then the explanation of the birds’ queer actions
flashed into both our heads at once: the eiders were
simply drowning the mussels in order to make them
loosen their grip and release the captive tongues. For
the moment a sea mollusc is put in fresh water the
salts in his body are dissolved, the osmotic balance is
disturbed, and he speedily swells up and becomes sick.

144 A Little Brother to the Bear

This is undoubtedly the true explanation, as I made
sure by testing the mussels repeatedly in fresh water,
and by watching the birds more closely at their feed-
ing. All winter they may be found along our coasts,
where they feed on the small shellfish that cover the
ledges. As the tide goes down they swim in from the
shoals, where they rest in scattered flocks, and chip
the mussels from the ledges, swallowing them shells
and all. A score of times I have hidden among the

rocks of the jetty, with a few wooden decoys in front

of me, and watched the eiders come in to feed. They
would approach the decoys rapidly, lifting their wings
repeatedly as a kind of salutation; then, angered ap-
parently that they were not welcomed by the same
signal of uplifted wings, they would swim up to the
wooden frauds and peck them savagely here and there,
and then leave them in disgust and scatter among the
rocks at my feet, paying little attention to me as long
as I kept perfectly still. For they are much tamer
than other wild ducks, and are, unfortunately, slow to
believe that man is their enemy.

I noticed another curious thing while watching
them and hoping that by some chance I might see one

caught by a mussel. When a flock was passing high ~

overhead, any sudden noise—a shout, or the near
report of a gun — would make the whole flock swoop

|

Animal Surgery 145

down like a flash close to the water. Plover have the
same habit when they first arrive from Labrador, but I
have hunted in vain for any satisfactory explanation
of the thing.

As the birds feed, a mussel will sometimes close his
shells hard on some careless duck’s tongue or bill, in
such a way that he cannot be crushed or swallowed or
broken against the rocks. In that case the bird, if he
knows the secret, will fly to fresh water and drown his
tormentor. Whether all the ducks have this wisdom,
or whether it is confined to a few rare birds, there is no
‘present means of knowing. I have seen three different
eiders practice this bit of surgery myself, and have
heard of at least a dozen more, all of the same species,
that were seen in fresh ponds or rivers, dipping their
heads under water repeatedly. In either case two
interesting questions suggest themselves: first, How
did a bird, whose whole life from birth to death is
spent on the sea, first learn that certain mussels will
drown in fresh water? and, second, How do the other
birds know it now, when the need arises unexpectedly?

Mie)
Wy

i

oa Sry

ies ee ee.

AGES ta BEHE man who hunts with gun or
camera has his reward. He has also his labors,
vexations, and failures; and these are the price he
pays for his success. The man who hunts without

uf peee

either gun or camera has, it seems to me, a much
greater reward, and has it without price. Of him
more than of any other Nimrod may be said what a
returned missionary from Africa said of his first con-
gregation, “They are a contented folk, clothed with
the sunlight and fed by gravitation.” Hunting with-
out a gun is, therefore, the sport of a peaceful man,
a man who goes to the woods for rest and for letting
his soul grow, and who, after a year of worry and work,
is glad to get along without either for a little season.

As he glides over the waterways in his canoe, or loafs
146

_ —

Hunting without a Gun 147

leisurely along the trail, he carries no weight of gun or
tripod or extra plates. Glad to be alive himself, he
has no pleasure in the death of the wild things. Con-
tent just to see and hear and understand, he has no
fret or sweat to get the sun just right and calculate his
exact thirty-foot distance and then to fume and swear,
as I have heard good men do, because the game fidgets,
or the clouds obscure the sun, or the plates are not
quick enough, or — beginning of sorrows !— because
he finds after the game has fled that the film he has
just used on a bull moose had all its good qualities
already preémpted by a landscape and a passing canoe.

I have no desire to decry any kind of legitimate
hunting, for I have tried them all and the rewards are
good. I simply like hunting without a gun or camera
better than all other forms of hunting for three good
reasons: first, because it is lazy and satisfying, perfect
for summer weather; second, because it has no troubles,
no vexations, no disappointments, and so is good for a
man who has wrestled long enough with these things;
and third, because it lets you into the life and individu-
ality of the wild animals as no other hunting can possi-
bly do, since you approach them with a mind at ease
and, having no excitement about you, they dare to
show themselves natural and unconcerned, or even a
bit curious about you to know who you are and what

148 A Little Brother to the Bear

you are doing. It has its thrills and excitements too,
as much or as little as you like. To creep up through
the brilée to where the bear and her cubs are gather-
ing blueberries in their greedy, funny way; to paddle
silently upon a big moose while his head is under
water and only his broad antlers show; to lie at ease
beside the trail, flecked with sunlight and shadow, and
have the squirrels scamper across your legs, or the
wild bird perch inquisitively upon your toe, or — rarest
sight in the woods in the early morning —to have a
fisher twist by you in intense, weasel-like excitement,
puzzling out the trail of the hare or grouse that passed
you an hour ago; to steal along the waterways alone,
on a still, dark night, and open your jack silently upon
ducks or moose or mother deer and her fawns, — there
is joy and tingle enough in all these things to satisfy
any lover of the woods. There is also wisdom to be
found, especially when you remember that these are
individual animals that no human eyes have ever before
looked upon, that they are different every one, and that
at any moment they may reveal some queer trick or
trait of animal life that no naturalist has ever before
seen. :
Last summer, just below my camp on Matagammon,
was a little beach between two points surrounded
by dense woods that the deer seemed to love better

whe

Hunting without a Gun 149

than any other spot on the whole lake: When we
first arrived the deer were close about our camp.
From the door we could sometimes see them on the
lake shore, and every evening at twilight they would
steal up shyly to eat the potato and apple parings.
Gradually the noises of camp drove them far back on
the ridges, though on stormy nights they would come
back when the camp was still and all lights out.
From my tent I would hear cautious rustlings, or the
crack of a twig, above the drip and pour of raindrops
on my tent-fly, and stealing out in the darkness
would find two or three deer, generally a doe and her
fawns, standing under the split roof of our woodshed
to escape the pelting rain.

The little beach was farther away, across an arm of
the lake and out of sight and sound of our camp, so
the deer never deserted it, though we watched them
there every day. Just why they liked it I could never
discover. A score of beaches on the lake were larger
and smoother, and a dozen at least offered better feed-
ing; but the deer came here in greater numbers than
anywhere else. Near by was a great wild meadow,
with dense hiding-places on the slopes beyond, where ~
deer were numerous. Before the evening feeding
began in the wild meadow they would come out to
this little beach and play for an hour or so; and I

150 A Little Brother to the Bear

have no doubt the place was a regular playground,
such as rabbits and foxes and crows, and indeed most
wild animals, choose for their hours of fun.

Once, at early twilight, I lay in hiding among some
old roots at the end of this little beach, watching a
curious game. Eight or ten deer, does and fawns and
young spike bucks, had come out into the open and
were now running rapidly in three circles arranged in
a line, so, oCo. In the middle was a big circle some
fifteen feet in diameter, and at opposite sides were two
smaller circles less than half the diameter of the first,
as I found afterwards by measuring from the tracks.
Around one of these small circles the deer ran from
right to left invariably; around the other they ran
from left to right; and around the big middle circle
they ran either way, though when two or three were
running this circle together, while the others bounded
about the ends, they all ran the same way. As they
played, all the rings were in use at once, the two
small end rings being much more used than the big
one. The individual deer passed rapidly from one
ring to the others, but — and here is the queerest part
of it all—TI did not see a single deer, not even one of

the fawns, cut across the big circle from one end ring —
to the other. After they were gone the rings showed —
clearly in the sand, but not a single track led across —

Hunting without a Gun 151

any of the circles. The object of the play was simple
enough. Aside from the fun, the young deer were
being taught to twist and double quickly; but what
the rules. of the game were, and whether they ran in
opposite circles to avoid getting dizzy, was more than
I could discover, though the deer were never more
than thirty yards away from me and_I could watch
every move clearly without my field-glasses. That
the game and some definite way of playing it were
well understood by the deer no one could doubt who
watched this wonderful play for five minutes. Though
they ran swiftly, with astonishing lightness and grace,
there was no confusion. Every now and then one of
the does would leap forward and head off one of her
fawns as he headed into the big ring, when like a flash
he would whirl in his tracks and away with a d/-7-7-¢ /
of triumph or dissatisfaction. Once a spike buck, and
again a doe with two well-grown fawns, trotted out
of the woods and, after watching the dizzy play for
a moment, leaped into it as if they understood per-
fectly what was expected. They played this game
only for a few minutes at a time; then they would
scatter and move up and down the shore leisurely and
nose the water. Soon one or two would come back,
and in a moment the game would be in full swing
again, the others joining it swiftly as the little creatures

152 A Little Brother to the Bear

whirled about the rings, exercising every muscle and
learning how to control their graceful bodies perfectly,
though they had no idea that older heads had planned
the game for them with a purpose.

Watching them thus at their play, the meaning of a
curious bit of deer anatomy became clear. A deer’s
shoulder is not attached to the skeleton at all; it lies
loosely inside the skin, with only a bit of delicate elas-
tic tissue joining it to the muscles of the body. When
a deer was headed suddenly and braced himself in his
tracks, the body would lunge forward till the fore legs
seemed hung almost in the middle of his belly. Again,
when he kicked up his heels, they would seem to be
supporting his neck, far forward of where they properly
belonged. This free action of the shoulder is what
gives the wonderful flexibility and grace to a deer’s
movements, just as it takes and softens all the shock
of falling in his high-jumping run among the rocks and
over the endless windfalls of the wilderness.

In the midst of the play, and after I had watched it
for a full half-hour, there was a swift rustle in the
woods on my right, and I caught my breath sharply
at sight of a magnificent buck standing half hid
in the underbrush. There were two or three big
bucks with splendid antlers that lived lazily on the
slopes above this part of the lake, and that I had been

Hunting without a Gun 153

watching and following for several weeks. Unlike
the does and fawns and young bucks, they were wild
as hawks and selfish as cats. They rarely showed
themselves in the open, and if surprised there with
other deer they bounded away at the first sight or sniff
of danger. Does and little fawns, when they saw you,
would instantly stamp and whistle to warn the other
deer before they had taken the first step to save them-
selves or investigate the danger; but the big bucks
would bound or glide away, according to the method
of your approach, and in saving their own skins, as
they thought, would have absolutely no concern for
the safety of the herd feeding near by.— And that is
one reason why, in a natural state, deer rarely allow
the bucks and bulls to lead them.

The summer laziness was still upon these big bucks;
the wild fall running had not yet seized them. Once
I saw a curious and canny bit of their laziness. I had
gone off with a guide to try the trout at a distant lake.
While I watched a porcupine and tried to win his con-
fidence with sweet chocolate —a bad shot, by the way
—the guide went on far ahead. As he climbed a
ridge, busy with thoughts of the dim blazed trail he
was following, I noticed a faint stir in some bushes
on one side, and through my glass I made out the
head of a big buck that was watching the guide keenly

154 A Little Brother to the Bear

from his hiding. It was in the late forenoon, when
deer are mostly resting, and the lazy buck was debat-
ying, probably, whether it were necessary for him to
run or not. The guide passed rapidly; then to my
astonishment the head disappeared as the buck lay
down where he was.

Keeping my eyes on the spot, I followed on the
guide’s trail. There was no sign of life in the thicket
as I passed, though beyond a doubt the wary old buck
was watching my every motion keenly. When I had
gone well past and still the thicket remained all quiet,
I turned gradually and walked towards it. There was
a slight rustle as the buck rose to his feet again. He
had evidently planned for me to follow the steps of
the other man, and had not thought it worth while to
stand up. Another slow step or two on my part, then
another rustle and a faint motion of underbrush — so
faint that, had there been a wind blowing, my eye

would scarcely have noticed it—told me where the

buck had glided away silently to another covert, where
he turned and stood to find out whether I had dis-

covered him, or whether my change of direction had

any other motive than the natural wandering of a man
lost in the woods.

That was far back on the ridges, where most of the |

big bucks loaf and hide, each one by himself, during

Hunting without a Gun 155

the summer. Down at the lake, however, there were
two or three that for some reason occasionally showed
themselves with the other deer, but were so shy and
wild that hunting them without a gun was almost
impossible. It was one of these big fellows that now
stood half hid in the underbrush within twenty yards
of me, watching the deer’s game impatiently.

A stamp of his foot and a low snort stopped the
play instantly, and the big buck moved out on the
shore in full view. He looked out over the lake,
where he had so often seen the canoes of men mov-
ing; his nose tried the wind up shore; eyes and ears
searched below, where I was lying; then he scanned
the lake again keenly. Perhaps he had seen my canoe
upturned among the water-grasses far away ; more prob-
ably it was the unknown sense or /ee/ of an enemy,
which they who hunt with or without a gun find
so often among the larger wild animals, that made
him restless and suspicious. While he watched and
searched the lake and the shores not a deer stirred
from his tracks. Some command was in the air, which
I myself seemed to feel in my hiding. Suddenly the
big buck turned and glided away into the woods, and
every deer on the shore followed instantly without
question or hesitation. Even the little fawns, never
so heedless as to miss a signal, felt something in the

156 A Little Brother to the Bear

buck’s attitude deeper than their play, something per-
haps in the air that was not noticed before, and trotted
after their mothers, fading away at last like shadows
into the darkening woods.

On another lake, years before, when hunting in the
same way without a gun, I saw another curious bit of
deer wisdom. It must be remembered that deer are
born apparently without any fear of man. The fawns
when found very young in the woods are generally
full of playfulness and curiosity; and a fawn that has
lost its mother will turn to a man quicker than to
any other animal. When deer see you for the first
time, no matter how old or young they are, they
approach cautiously, if you do not terrify them by
sudden motions, and in twenty pretty ways try to find
out what you are. Like most wild animals that have
a keen sense of smell, and especially like the bear and
caribou, they trust only their noses at first. When
they scent man for the first time they generally run
away, not because they know what it means but for
precisely the opposite reason, because there is in
the air a strong scent that they do not know, and
that they have not been taught by their mothers how
to meet. When in doubt run away—that is the
rule of nose which seems to be impressed by their
mothers upon all timid wild things, though they act

Hunting without a Gun 157

in almost the opposite way when sight or hearing
is in question.

All this is well known to hunters; but now comes
the curious exception. After I had been watching
the deer for some weeks at one of their playgrounds,
a guide came into camp with his wife and little child.
They were on their way in to their own camp for the
hunting season. To please the little one, who was
fond of all animals, I took her with me to show her
the deer playing. As they were running about on the
shore I sent her out of our hiding, in a sudden spirit
of curiosity, to see what the deer and fawns would do.
True to her instructions, the little one walked out very
_ slowly into the midst of them. They started at first;
two of the old deer circled down instantly to wind her;
but even after getting her scent, the suspicious man-
scent that most of them had been taught to fear, they
approached fearlessly, their ears set forward and their
expressive tails down, without any of the nervous wig-
gling that is so manifest whenever their owners catch
the first suspicious smell in the air. The child, mean-
while, sat on the shore, watching the pretty creatures
with wide-eyed curiosity, but obeying my first whispered
instructions like a little hero and keeping still as a
hunted rabbit. Two little spotted fawns were already
circling about her playfully, but the third went straight

158 A Little Brother to the Bear

up to her, stretching his nose and ears forward to show
his friendliness, and then drawing back to stamp his
little fore foot prettily to make the silent child move
or speak, and perhaps also to show her in deer fashion
that, though friendly, he was not at all afraid.

There was one buck in the group, a three-year-old
with promising antlers. At first he was the only deer
that showed any fear of the little visitor; and his fear
seemed to me to be largely a matter of suspicion, or of
irritation that anything should take away the herd’s
attention from himself. The fall wildness was coming
upon him, and he showed it by restless fidgeting, by
frequent proddings of the does with his antlers, and by
driving them about roughly and unreasonably. Now
he approached the child with a shake of his antlers,
not to threaten her, it seemed to me, but rather to
show the other deer that he was still master, the Great
Mogul who must be consulted upon all occasions. For
the first time the little girl started nervously at the
threatening motion. I called softly to her to keep still
and not be afraid, at the same time rising up quietly
from my hiding-place. Instantly the little comedy
changed as the deer whirled in my direction. They
had seen men before and knew what it meant. The
white flags flew up over the startled backs, and the
air fairly bristled with whistling -e-e-e-yeu, he-u's as

Hunting without a Gun 159

deer and fawns rose over the nearest windfalls like a
flock of frightened partridges and plunged away into
the shelter of the friendly woods.

There are those who claim that the life of an animal
is a mere matter of blind instinct and habit. Here on
the shore before my eyes was a scene that requires a
somewhat different explanation.

Though deer are the most numerous and the most
interesting animals to be hunted without a gun, they
are by no means the only game to fill the hunter’s heart
full and make him glad that his game bag is empty.
Moose are to be found on the same waters, and in the
summer season, if approached very slowly and quietly,
especially in a canoe, they show little fear of man. Last
summer, as I stole down the thoroughfare into Mata-
gammon, a cow moose and her calf loomed up before
me in the narrow stream. I watched her awhile
silently, noting her curious way of feeding,— now
pulling up a bite of lush water-grass, now stretching
her neck and her great muffle to sweep off a mouthful
of water-maple leaves, first one then the other, like a
boy with two apples; while the calf nosed along the
shore and paid no attention to the canoe, which he saw
perfectly but which his mother did not see. After
watching them a few minutes I edged across to the

160 A Little Brother to the Bear

opposite bank and drifted down to see if it were pos-
sible to pass without disturbing them. The calf was
busy with something on the bank, the mother deep in
the water-grass as I drifted by, sitting low in the canoe.
She saw me when abreast of her, and after watching
me a moment in astonishment turned again to her
feeding. Then I turned the canoe slowly and lay to
leeward of them, within ten yards, watching every sig-
nificant motion. The calf was nearer to me now, and
the mother by a silent command brought him back
and put him on the side away from me; but the little
fellow’s curiosity was aroused by the prohibition, and
he kept peeking under his mother’s belly, or twisting
his head around over her hocks, to see who I was and
what I was doing. But there was no fear manifest,
and I backed away slowly at last and left them feeding
just where I had found them.

In curious contrast was the next meeting. It was
on the little beaver stream below Hay Lake, a spot
as wild as any dream of Doré, and a famous feeding-
ground for moose and deer. I was fishing for trout
when a mother moose came up-stream among the
bilberry and alder bushes. I had stopped casting and
sat low in my canoe, and she did not see me until
abreast of me, within twenty feet. Then she swung
her huge head carelessly in my direction, and went on

Hunting without a Gun 161

as if I were of no more account than one of the beaver
houses on the shore. Ten steps behind her came a
calf. The leaves had scarcely closed on her flanks
when he put his head out of the bushes and came
plump upon me. With a squeal and a jump like a
startled deer he plunged away through the bushes,
and I heard the mother swing round in a crashing
circle to find him and to know what had frightened
him. Ten minutes later, as I sat very still-in the
same spot, a huge head was thrust out of the bushes
where the calf had disappeared. Below it, pressing
close against his mother’s side, was thes head of the
little one, looking out again at the thing that had
frightened him. He had brought her back to see,
and was now plainly asking What zs zt, mother ? what
zs it? though there was never a sound uttered. And
there they stayed for a full minute, while none of us
moved a muscle, before they drew back silently and
disappeared, leaving only a double line of waving,
quivering bush tops, like the trail of a huge snake, to
tell me where they had gone.

On the same stream I got the famous bull of the
expedition. I was paddling along silently when I
turned a bend, and a huge dark bulk loomed suddenly
dead ahead of the canoe. In front of the moose two
great antlers, the biggest I ever saw in Maine, reached

162 A Little Brother to the Bear

up and out of the water. The rest of his head was
below the surface, groping for lily roots, and my first
exultant thought was that one might drive the canoe
between the tips of those great antlers without touch-
ing them, so big and wide were they. Instead I sent
the canoe swiftly forward till his head began to come
up, when I crouched low and watched him, so near
that every changing expression of his huge face and
keen little eyes was seen perfectly without my glasses.
He saw me instantly and dropped the root he had
pulled up, and his lower jaw remained hanging in his
intense wonder. Not so much who I was, but how
on earth I got there so silently, seemed to be the cause
of his wonder. He took a slow step or two in my
direction, his ears set forward stiffly and his eyes
shining as he watched me keenly for the slightest
motion. Then he waded out leisurely, climbed the
bank, which was here steep, and disappeared in the
woods. As he vanished I followed him, close behind,
and watched his way of carrying his huge antlers and
lifting his legs with a high step, like a Shanghai
rooster, over the windfalls. Of all the moose that I
have ever followed, this was the only one whose head
seemed too heavy for comfort. .He carried it low,
and nursed his wide antlers tenderly among the tree
trunks and alder stems. They were still in the velvet,

i Canale

Lo

‘‘Lunged away at a

terrific pace’’

Hunting without a Gun 163

and no doubt the rude scraping of the rough branches
made him wince unless he went softly. At last, find-
ing that I was close at his heels, he turned for another
look at me; but I slipped behind a friendly tree until I
heard him move on, when I followed him again. Some
suspicion of the thing that was on his trail, or it may
be some faint eddy of air with the danger smell in it,
reached him then; he laid his great antlers back on
his shoulders, moose fashion, and lunged away at a
terrific pace through the woods. I could fancy his
teeth gritting and his eyes at squint as some snapping
branch whacked his sensitive antlers and made him
grunt with the pain of it. But the fear behind was
all-compelling, and in a moment I had lost him in the
shadow and silence of the big woods.

It was that same night, I think, that I had another
bit of this good hunting, which fills one’s soul with
peace and gives him a curious sense of understanding
the thoughts and motives of the Wood Folk. I was
gliding along in my canoe in the late twilight over
still water, in the shadow of the wild high meadow-
grass, when a low quacking and talking of wild ducks
‘came to my ears. I pushed the canoe silently into
the first open bogan in the direction of the sounds,
till I was so near that I dared not go another foot,
when I rose up cautiously and peered over the grass

164 A Little Brother to the Bear

tops. There were perhaps thirty or forty of the splen-
did birds — four or five broods, at least, and each brood
led by its careful mother — that had just left the little
ponds in which they were born and reared and were
now flocking for the first time in the big lake.

For two or three days past I had noticed the young
broods flying about, exercising their wings in prepara-
tion for the long autumn flights. Now they were all
gathered on a dry mud-flat surrounded by tall grass,
playing together and evidently getting acquainted.
In the middle of the flat were two or three tussocks
on which the grass had been trampled and torn down.
There was always a duck on each of these tussocks,
and below him were four or five more that were plainly
trying to get up; but the top was small and had room
for but one, and there was a deal of quacking and
good-natured scrambling for the place of vantage. It
was a game, plainly enough, for while the birds below
were trying to get up the little fellow on top was
doing his best to keep them down. Other birds
scampered in pairs from one side of the flat to the
other; and there was one curious procession, or race,
— five or six birds that started abreast and very slowly,
and ended with a rush and a headlong dive into the
grasses of the opposite shore. Here and there about
the edges of the playground an old mother bird sat

Hunting without a Gun 165

on a tussock and looked down on the wild uncon-
scious play, wiggling her tail in satisfaction and anon
stretching her neck to look and listen watchfully.
The voices of the playing birds were curiously low
and subdued, reminding me strongly of some Indian
children that I had once seen playing. At times the
quacking had a faint ventriloquous effect, seeming to
come from far away, and again it ceased absolutely
at a sign from some watchful mother, though the play
went steadily on, as if even in their play they must
be mindful of the enemies that were watching and
listening everywhere to catch them.

As I rose a bit higher to see some birds that were
very near me but screened by the meadow-grass, my
foot touched a paddle and rattled it shghtly. A single
quack, different from all others, followed instantly,
and every bird stopped just where he was and stretched
his neck high to listen. One mother bird saw me,
though I could not tell which one it was until she
slipped down from her bog and waddled bravely across
in my direction. Then a curious thing happened,
which I have often seen and wondered at among gre-
garious birds and animals. A signal was given, but
without any sound that my ears could detect in the
intense twilight stillness. It was as if a sudden impulse
had been sent out like an electric shock to every bird

166 A Little Brother to the Bear

in the large flock. At the same instant every duck
crouched and sprang; the wings struck down sharply;
the flock rose together, as if flung up from a pigeon
trap, and disappeared with a rush of wings and a
hoarse tumult of quacking that told every creature
on the great marsh that danger was afoot. Wings
flapped loudly here and there; bitterns squawked;
herons croaked; a spike buck whistled and jumped
close at hand; a passing musquash went down with a
slap of his tail and.a plunge like a falling rock. Then
silence settled over the marsh again, and there was not
a sound to tell what Wood Folk were abroad in the still
night, nor what business or pleasure occupied them.
Formerly caribou might be found on these same
waterways, and they are the most curious and interest-
ing game that can be hunted without a gun; but years
ago a grub destroyed all the larches on which the
wandering woodland caribou depend largely for food.
The deer, which are already as many as the country
can support in winter, take care of the rest of the good
browse, so that there was nothing left for the caribou
but to cross over the line into New Brunswick, where —
larches are plenty and where there is an abundance of
the barren moss that can be dug up out of the snow.
Better still, if one is after caribou, is the great wilder-
ness of northern Newfoundland, where the caribou

Hunting without a Gun 167

spend the summer and where from a mountain top
one may count hundreds of the splendid animals scat-
tered over the country below in every direction. And
hunting them so, with the object of finding out the
secrets of their curious lives, — why, for instance, each
herd often chooses its own burying-ground, or why a
bull caribou loves to pound a hollow stump for hours
at a time, —this is, to my mind, infinitely better sport
than the hunt for a head, where one waylays them on
their paths of migration, the paths that have been
sacred for untold generations, and shoots them down
as they pass like tame cattle.

To the hunter without a gun there is no close sea-
son on any game, and a doe and her fawns are better
hunting than a ten-point buck. By land or water he
is always ready; there are no labors for effects, except
what he chooses to impose upon himself; no dis-
appointments are possible, for whether his game be
still or on the jump, shy as a wilderness raven or full
of curiosity as a blue jay, he always finds something to
stow away in his heart in the place where he keeps
things that he loves to remember. All is fish that
comes into his net, and everything is game that catches
the glance of his eye in earth or air or water. Now it
is the water-spiders—skaters the boys call them —
that play a curious game among the grass stems, and

168 A Little Brothas to the Bear

that have more wonderful habits than the common
balloon spiders, which sometimes turned Jonathan
Edwards’ thoughts from the stern, unlovable God of
his theology to the patient, care-taking Servant of the
universe that some call Force, and others Law, and
that one who knew Him called The Father, alike
among the lilies of the field and in the cities of men,
Now it is an otter and her cubs playing on the surface,
that sink when they see you and suddenly come
up near your canoe, like a log shot up on end, and
with half their bodies out of water to see better say
w-h-e-e-e-yew ! like a baby seal, to express their wonder
at such a queer thing in the lake. Nowit is a mother
loon, taking her young on her back as they leave the
eggs and carrying them around the lake awhile, to dry
them thoroughly in the sun before she dives from under
them and wets them for the first time; and you must
follow a long while before you find out why. Now it
is a bear and her cubs —I watched three of them for
an hour or more, one afternoon, as they gathered blue-
berries. At first they champed them from the bushes,
stems, leaves and all, just as they grew. Again, when
they found a good bush, a little one with lots of ber-
ries, they would bite it off close to the ground, or tear
it up by the roots, and then taking it by the stem with
both paws would pull it through their mouths from

Hunting without a Gun 169

one side to the other, stripping off every berry and
throwing the useless bush away. Again they would
strike the bushes with their paws, knocking off a
shower of the ripest berries, and then scrape them all
together very carefully into a pile and gobble them
down at a single mouthful. And whenever, in wan-
dering about after a good bush, one of the cubs spied
the other busy at an unusually good find, it gave one
a curlous remembrance of his own boyhood to see the
little fellow rush up whimpering to get his share
before all the bushes should be stripped clean.

That was good hunting. It made one glad to let
even this rare prowler of the woods go in peace. And
that suggests the very best thing that can be said for
the hunter without a gun: “ The wilderness and the
solitary place shall be glad for him,” for something of
the gentle spirit of Saint Francis comes with him, and
when he goes he leaves no pain nor death nor fear of
man behind him.

A. old Indian, whom I know well, HX LP
ae 6h CN
once caught a bear in his deadfall. A ee e
That same day the bear’s mate came Gay gt
and tried to lift away the heavily — i
weighted log that had fallen on her back and crushed
her. Failing in this, he broke his way into the inclo-
sure; and when the Indian came, drawn in on silent,
inquisitive feet by a curious low sound in the air, the
bear was sitting beside his dead mate, holding her
head in his arms, rocking it to and fro, moaning. —
Two things must be done by the modern nature
writer who would first understand the animal world
and then share his discovery with others. He must
collect his facts, at first hand if possible, and then he
must interpret the facts as they appeal to his own
head and heart in the light of all the circumstances
that surround them. The child will be content with

his animal story, but the man will surely ask the why
170

The Point of View 171

and the how of every fact of animal life that particu-
larly appeals to him. For-every fact is also a revela-
tion, and is chiefly interesting, not for itself, but for
the law or the life which lies behind it and which it in
some way expresses. An apple falling to the ground
was a common enough fact, —so common that it had
no. interest, until some one thought about it and found
the great law that grips alike the falling apple and the
falling star.

It is so in the animal world. The common facts of
color, size, and habit were seen for centuries, but had
little meaning or interest until some one thought about
them and gave us the law of species. For most birds
and animals these common facts and their meaning
are now well known, and it is a wearisome and thank-
less task to go over them again. The origin of species
and the law of gravitation are now put in the same
comfortable category with the steam engine and the
telegraph wire, and other things that we think we
understand. Meanwhile the air has unseen currents
that are ready to bear our messages, and the sun
wastes enough energy on our unresponsive planet
daily to make all our engine fires unnecessary, if we
but understood. Meanwhile, in the animal world, an
immense array of new facts are hidden away, or are
slowly coming to light as nature students follow the

172 A Little Brother to the Bear

wild things in their native haunts and find how widely
they differ one from another of the same kind, and how
far they transcend the printed lists of habits that are
supposed to belong to them.

We were too long content with the ugly telegraph
pole and wire as the limit of perfection in communica-
tion; and we have been too well satisfied with the
assumption that animals are governed by some queer,
unknown thing called instinct, and that all are alike
that belong to the same class. That is true only out-
wardly. It is enough to give the animal a specific
name, but no more; and an animal’s name or species
is not the chief thing about him. Youare not through
with Indians when you have determined their race and
tribe. That is sufficient for ethnology, to write in a
book; possibly also the Calvinistic theologian was one
time satisfied therewith; but the Indian’s life still
remains, more important than his race, and only after
two centuries of neglect, or persecution, or injustice,
are we awaking to the fact that his life is one of ex-
traordinary human interest. His medicine lore and
his thoughts of God lie deeper than the curve of
his cranium; his legends and his rude music must
be interpreted, as well as the color of his skin; and
we are but just beginning to see the meaning of these
larger things.

he

The Point of View 173

All this is only an analogy and proves nothing.
However, it may suggest, if one thinks about it, that
possibly we have made a slightly similar mistake about
the animals; that we are not quite through with them
when we have cried instinct and named their species,
nor altogether justified in killing them industriously
off the face of the earth —as we once did with the
poor Beothuk Indians, for the rich furs that they wore.
Beneath their fur and feathers is their life; and a few
observers are learning that their life also, with its faint
suggestion of our own primeval childhood, is one of
intense human interest. Some of them plan and calcu-
late; and mathematics, however elementary, is hardly a
matterofinstinct. Some of them build damsand canals;
some have definite social regulations ; some rescue com-
rades in distress; some bind their own wounds, and
even set a broken leg ina clay cast, which is made more
adhesive by being mixed with fibers or feathers. All
higher orders communicate more or less with each
other, and train their young, and modify their habits
to meet changing conditions. These things, and many
more quite as wonderful, are also facts. We are still
waiting for the naturalist who will tell us truly what
they mean.

I have had these two things — the new facts and the
interpretation thereof —in mind in putting together

174 A Luttle Brother to the Bear

these sketches from my note-books and wilderness
records. The facts have been carefully selected
from many years’ observations, with a view of empha-
sizing some of the unusual or unknown things of the
animal world. Indeed, in all my work, or rather play,
out of doors, I have tried to discover the unusual
things, the things that mark an animal’s individuality,
leaving the work of general habits and specific classi-
fication to other naturalists who know more and can
do it better. Therefore have I passed over a hundred
animals or birds to watch one, and have recorded only
the rare observations, such as are seldom seen, and
then only by men who spend long days and seasons in
the woods in silent watchfulness.

Whether these rare habits are common property
among the species, and seem strange to us only be-
“cause we know so very little of the hidden life of wild
animals, or whether they are the discovery of a few
rare individuals better endowed by nature than their
fellows, I must leave to the reader to determine; for
I do not know. This determination, however, must
come not by theory or prejudice or a priord reasoning,
but simply by watching the animals more closely when
they are unconscious of man’s presence and so express
themselves naturally. As a possible index in the
matter, I might suggest that I have rarely made an

The Point of View 175

observation, however incredible it seemed to me at the
time, without sooner or later finding some Indian or
trapper or naturalist who had seen a similar thing
among the wild creatures. The woodcock genius,
whose story is recorded here, is a case in point. So is
the porcupine that rolled down a long hill, for the fun
of the thing apparently —an observation that has been
twice confirmed, once by a New Brunswick poacher
and again by a Harvard instructor. So also are the
wildcat that stole my net, and the heron that chummed
little fish by a bait, and the fox that played possum
when caught in a coop, and the kingfishers that stocked
a pool with minnows for their little ones to catch, and
the toad that learned to sit on a cow’s hoof and wait
for the flies at milking time. All these, and a score
more of incredible things, seen by different observers
in different places, would seem to indicate that intelli-
gence is more widely spread among the Wood Folk
than we had supposed; and that, when we have
opened our eyes wider and cast aside our prejudices,
we shall learn that Nature is generous, even to the
little folk, with her gifts and graces.

As for the interpretation of the facts, upon which I
have occasionally ventured, — that is wholly my own,
and is of small consequence beside the other. Its
value is a purely personal one, and I have recorded it

176 A. Little Brother to the Bear

rather to set the reader thinking for himself than to
answer his questions. In the heart of every man will
be found the measure of his world, whether it be small
or great. He will judge heat, not by mathematical
computation of the sun’s energy, but by the twitch of
his burned finger, as every other child does; and com-
prehend the law of reaction, not from Ganot’s treatise,
but by pulling on his own boot-straps. So, with all
the new facts of animal life before him, he will still
live in a blind world and understand nothing until he
have the courage to look in his own heart and read.

GLOSSARY OF INDIAN NAMES

Cheokhes, ché@ok-hés’, the mink.

Cheplahgan, chep-lih’gan, the bald eagle.

Ch’geegee-lokh-sis, ch’gee-gee’lock-sts, the chickadee.

Chigwooltz, chzg-wooltz’, the bullfrog.

Clote Scarpe, a legendary hero, like Hiawatha, of the Northern Indians. .
Pronounced variously, Clote Scarpe, Groscap, Gluscap, etc.

Commoosie, co7-m00-sie’, a little shelter, or hut, of boughs and bark.

Deedeeaskh, dee-dee’ask, the blue jay.

Eleemos, e/-ce’mos, the fox.

Hawahak, hd-wd-hak’, the hawk.

Hukweem, /uk-weem’, the great northern diver, or loon.

Ismaques, zss-72d-ques’, the fish-hawk.

Kagax, kdg’ax, the weasel.

Kakagos, £a-ka-gds’, the raven.

K’dunk, 2’dunk’, the toad.

Keeokuskh, £¢e-o-kusk’, the muskrat.

Keeonekh, £ee’o-nek, the otter.

Killooleet, £2/’/oo-leet, the white-throated sparrow.

Kookooskoos, £o0-koo-skoos’, the great horned owl.

Koskomenos, £0s'£0m-e-nds’, the kingfisher.

Kupkawis, cup-kq’w7s, the barred owl.

Kwaseekho, 4w<d-seck’ho, the sheldrake.

Lhoks, /ocks, the panther.

Malsun, #da/’sun, the wolf.

Meeko, week’, the red squirrel.

Megaleep, meg’d-leep, the caribou.

Milicete, 722/’i-cete, the name of an Indian tribe; written also Malicete.

Mitches, #zz¢’chés, the birch partridge, or ruffed grouse.

177

178 A Little Brother to the Bear

Moktaques, wok-ta’ques, the hare.
Mooween, #z00-ween’, the black bear.
Mooweesuk, 700-wee’suk, the coon.
Musquash, zus’gudsh, the muskrat.
Nemox, 7é2’ox, the fisher.
Pekompf, f2-kompf’, the wildcat.
Pekquam, ~ek-wiaim’, the fisher.
Quoskh, guzoskh, the blue heron.
Seksagadagee, sek’sd-ga-da'gee, the Canada grouse, or spruce
partridge.
Skooktum, shook’tum, the trout.
Tookhees, 70/’hees, the woodmouse.
Umquenawis, 72-que-nd’ wis, the moose.
Unk Wunk, wxk’ wunk, the porcupine.
Upweekis, uf-week’iss, the Canada lynx.
Whitooweek, whzt-00-week’, the woodcock.

_

| ANNOUNCEMENTS

{~

irs

=]

MOOD FOLK SERIES

By WILLIAM J. LONG

HE unique merit of this nature student rests in his fascinating style of
writing, which invariably interests young and old; for without this
element his pioneer work in the realm of nature would now be familiar
only to scientists. As it is, Long’s Wood Folk Series is in use in

thousands of schools the country over, has been adopted by many reading circles,
and is now on the library lists of six important states; thus leading laymen,
young and old, into the wonderland of naturye hitherto entirely closed to all.

WAYS OF WOOD FOLK

205 pages. Illustrated. List price, 50 cents; mailing price, 60 cents

This delightful work tells of the lives and habits of the commoner wood folk, such
as the crow, the rabbit, the wild duck. The book is profusely illustrated by Charles
Copeland and other artists.

WILDERNESS WAYS
155 pages. Illustrated. List price, 45 cents; mailing price, 50 cents

‘“Wilderness Ways ”’ is written in the same intensely interesting style as its predeces-
sor, ‘‘ Ways of Wood Folk.’? The hidden life of the wilderness is here presented by
sketches and stories gathered, not from books or hearsay, but from the author’s personal
contact with wild things of every description.

SECRETS OF THE WOODS

184 pages. Illustrated. List price, 50 cents; mailing price, 60 cents

This is another chapter in the shy, wild life of the fields and woods. Little Toohkees,
the wood mouse that dies of fright in the author’s hand; the mother otter, Keeonekh,
teaching her little ones to swim ; and the little red squirrel with his many curious habits,
—all are presented with the same liveliness and color that characterize the descriptions
in the first two volumes. The illustrations by Charles Copeland are unusually accurate
in portraying animal life as it really exists in its native haunts.

WOOD “FOLK AT SCHOOL

186 pages. Illustrated. List price, 50 cents; mailing price, 60 cents

The title of this new book suggests the central thought about which the author has
grouped some of his most fascinating animal studies. To him ‘the summer wilderness
is one vast schoolroom in which a multitude of wise, patient mothers are teaching their
little ones the things they must know in order to hold their place in the world and escape
Sa from a hundred dangers.”’ This book, also, is adequately illustrated by Charles

peland.

A LITTLE BROTHER TO THE BEAR
178 pages. Illustrated. List price, cents; mailing price, cents

This latest book in the Wood Folk Series contains observations covering a period of
nearly thirty years. Some of the chapters represent the characteristics of animals of the
same species, and others show the acute intelligence of certain individual animals that
nature seems to have lifted far above the level of their fellows. The book is well illus-
trated and is the most noteworthy contribution to nature literature during the past two years.

GINN & COMPANY PuBLIsHERs

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